Sign our Petition for disaggregated HIV data on migrants in Europe!

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Source: European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Continuum of HIV care. Monitoring implementation of the Dublin Declaration on partnership to fight HIV/AIDS in Europe and Central Asia: 2020 progress report. Stockholm: ECDC; 2021

Know your epidemic, target your response

The Problem:

The founding mandate of the ECDC is the surveillance of communicable diseases. Their mandate has recently expanded and national authorities recognised during COVID-19 that there is the need for coordination and management at the EU-level for shared concerns that cross borders. The health of migrants is inherently a transboundary dynamic that requires this same coordination and management from the EU-level:

  1. The available data is clear: in 2020 approximately 2.2 million people were living with HIV in the WHO European Region and approximately 104,000 were diagnosed with HIV. Of those 104,000 new diagnoses, 44% occurred within migrants.
  2. According to a 2017 study of migrants living with HIV in Belgium, Greece, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK, 63% acquired HIV after they migrated to the European region.
  3. In 2020, only 4 countries in the WHO European Region were able to provide data on migrants for all 4 stages of the Cascade of Care (CoC).

There is serious current gap in data on migrants in Europe who account for over 40% of new HIV annually across the region – if they are not accurately counted, how can we accurately understand the epidemic?

As the end users of data, we are monitoring the available indicators and are unable to use them for our advocacy purposes because the ECDC is not collecting data on migration status from the member states.

The Solution:

We cannot truly get to Zero HIV in 2030 if we don’t effectively factor migrants into the HIV response or recognise the existing inequities in how HIV is being responded to in the EU/EEA. We will not reach goal 3.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals.

We request that ECDC work with surveillance teams in member states to collect and present complete and disaggregated data on migrants from all EU/EEA member states along all 4 steps of the CoC by 2025 so that we can bring this piece of the puzzle into the whole picture.

Required actions:

Where is the data? The existing data is helpful but incomplete because it doesn’t include key populations. It risks masking the inequalities and inequities that exist within and between countries. Join us in petitioning the ECDC for the data to know our epidemic and to target our responses, our allocation of resources and our culturally appropriate programming so that we can end the HIV epidemic in our region by 2030.

Petition to ECDC and EU Member States to collect and present disaggregated HIV Data for migrants in Europe

Sign our petition to show your support for the cause.

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