Gavrilova Diana

The potential US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement has widespread implications for society and the environment. While much attention has been focused on melting glaciers, rising sea levels and conflicts over limited resources, another area is a serious problem: human health.
Climate change also undermines improvements in the management of existing disease outbreaks. This applies to South Africa. As a result of its efforts, the government has reduced the likelihood of patients moving from HIV to AIDS, thereby extending the lives of many people for years or decades.
South Africa's HIV approach provides important lessons for the future of HIV management, but it also opens up new challenges that will arise from global climate change. One of these problems is ensuring that HIV-infected people have food.

Food shortage
At the end of 2015, an estimated 36.7 million people worldwide were living with HIV / AIDS, and in the same year, about 2.1 million people became infected with HIV. Approximately two million patients receive treatment in South Africa every day, which means that more people living with HIV live there than in any other country.
While the availability of drugs to treat HIV / AIDS reflects encouraging changes in the global response to the epidemic, the idea of ​​HIV as a chronic disease has its limitations. In particular, a serious problem for people in this part of the world is not the lack of antiretroviral drugs, but the lack of food.
Food production is even more difficult due to weather variability associated with global climate change. An interview was conducted in January 2016, at the height of the drought that swept the South African region. Due to El Niño, which led to dry and warm weather, 2015 was the driest year in South Africa since official reports appeared in 1904.
The South African Meteorological Service reported that during the heatwave in early January 2016, 31 observation points recorded new record maximum temperatures. Food prices rose, and millions of tons of corn, the country's staple food, were imported to meet consumer needs.

Drought
These problems were reflected in the interview with an HIV-positive grandmother. Pointing to the home garden where she was growing vegetables for the family, she noticed that due to lack of rain she had not planted them yet. She explained: “We suffer from a lack of rain. If it rains, we can do all this, we can grow some sweet potatoes and cassava, but if there is no water, we are not at all healthy. ”
Food production and food security, which are associated with changes in climate dynamics, create an additional burden for the social and natural environment in conditions of limited resources. Managed HIV is survival, and that survival depends not only on access to antiretroviral drugs, but also on the totality of social and environmental resources that have become necessary to meet health needs in an era of global climate change.

- Pravda.ru