ITPC’s new Advocacy & Actions Committee is instituting a monthly action alert newsletter. The ITPC Treatment Access Alert will be two-pages and will offer short bulletins on current crises in access to treatment around the world along with an “action of the month” which will highlight a particular alert of high importance.

The purpose of the Treatment Access Alert is to allow ITPC members to inform others about urgent problems in access to AIDS treatment in their countries, particularly those that need an intervention by ITPC and its members from around the world.

If there is a pressing problem in your country and you want to let others know about it, please submit alerts to us at
itpcalerts@gmail.com

All alerts should be no more than 5-10 lines long (in 12 point type). The alerts should briefly describe the situation in your country clearly and where relevant, offer an action for ITPC members to take to assist you in resolving the current crisis. The alerts should also provide the name and contact information of someone from whom people can request additional information on your issue.

The Advocacy & Actions Committee will collect all submissions until the 10th of every month, compile them, select the most urgent for the newsletter and edit them for clarity and brevity and publish them on ITPC on the 15th of every month, in a printable format. We will also have the alerts translated into the official languages of ITPC: French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Portuguese.

The first ITPC Treatment Access Alert will be issued on 15 February, thus the deadline for all submissions is 10 February.

Thank you,
Estella, German, Loon, Thomas, Raminta, Gregg, Odilon, Chris, Vijay, Shiba & Bartalomew

For those interested in joining the Advocacy & Actions Committee, please contact the committee at itpc-advocacy@googlegroups.com or make a request to join on its webpage at: http://groups.google.com/group/itpc-advocacy. The Advocacy & Actions Committee is currently developing a terms of reference for its work, but is seeking active volunteers willing to assist the committee in the projects it proposed to do at the recent meeting in Bangkok.

The Advocacy and Actions Committee will be a working committee, which draft letters, policy statements, and perhaps develops advocacy trainings-all information will be shared with the larger ITPC list-only join the committee is you’re interested in day-to-day work on developing advocacy responses to current issues

The brief report on the situation in the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We are calling your attention to the new digest of reports on the situation with an access to hepatitis treatment in the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We hope that it will help us to uncover the most burning issues and give us an opportunity to make up the common plan of actions, as well as to react, immediately and harmoniously, to the extreme situations, to help each other and to be well-informed The decision was made to create a new survey each month, where some single issue would be examined.