‘Lazarus Effect’ Highlights AIDS in Africa

Currently, sub-Saharan Africa is home to around 30 million people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. For many of these afflicted, poverty is a way of life and critical treatment is a luxury few can afford. To help bring attention to the plight of so many sick and infirm, cable channel HBO is premiering “The Lazarus Effect,” a documentary by Lance Bangs. “The Lazarus Effect,” which delivers a sobering look at the cultural pandemic of AIDS in Africa, also delivers hope in the form of four Zambia residents who successfully access treatment and change their lives.

Bangs, an established documentary filmmaker and music video director, felt an immense personal pressure to get involved with “The Lazarus Effect.”

“I personally grew up watching films like “And The Band Played On” and lost friends and teachers to HIV in America in the late 80s and early 90s,” Bangs said in a live interview on The Huffington Post. “I’d gone to see the Names Project quilt several times, but had sort of drifted away from having that at the forefront of my mind in more recent years as treatment became available to friends here in the west.”

Yet Bangs observed that the world over was continuing to struggle with coming to grips with AIDS. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama lifted the 25-year-old travel ban which had barred foreigners with the disease from entering the country, signaling a noticeable shift in the cultural response. This shift, according to Bangs, represents the change of the tide in favor of a more compassionate AIDS approach, one that is included in “Lazarus.”

“The lift of the travel ban was good news,” Bangs says. “…two of the woman featured in the film (Constance and Concilia) were able to travel to New York to spend a week visiting around the time the film screened at the Museum of Modern Art earlier in May.”

The travel ban is iconic of America’s initial response to the early days of the epidemic. Growing up against this backdrop of fear, Bangs felt keenly impacted by the stigma associated with the disease. As an adult, he realized how the lack of concrete information influenced many of the Draconian policies impacted to unfairly isolate those with AIDS.

“Yeah, growing up as the disease was spreading in the US, I definitely felt like the more information was presented in the media, the less stigma would affect people,” Bangs says. “It has been encouraging to see this progress. Also, the good news shown in ‘The Lazarus Effect’ of how this treatment seems to be working will hopefully help as well. Very few people had any reluctance to meeting us or being interviewed or filmed. It felt like so many of them have been personally affected by loss to HIV since the late 1990s that the days of pretending AIDS only affects ‘other people’ have been replaced with an urgent sense of working to lower prevalence and to get people on treatment.”

Though AIDS is no longer seen as the the death sentence that ended the lives of individuals like Isaac Asimov, Bobbi Campbell and Rock Hudson, it’s still a largely misunderstood and under-treated disease, with Africa bearing the brunt of the overwhelming epidemic. America, which has long been the largest contributor to such programs internationally, has substantially increased access to AIDS-specific medicine. Two weeks ago, The New York Times reported that a “golden window” has emerged, making treatment methods more accessible and affordable for the population of various African countries that are disproportionately infected with large numbers of AIDS patients.

“The last decade has been what some doctors call a ‘golden window’ for treatment,” Donald G. McNeil Jr. writes on May 9. “Drugs that once cost $12,000 a year fell to less than $100, and the world was willing to pay. In Uganda, where fewer than 10,000 were on drugs a decade ago, nearly 200,000 now are, largely as a result of American generosity.”

Still, “The Lazarus Effect” couldn’t be airing at a more critical time for AIDS awareness, research and prevention. With economic pressure slashing budgets for any number of causes, programs aimed at AIDS research, prevention management and outbreak reduction have been left particularly vulnerable as funding by sources including the Obama administration, the British government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have opted to shift AIDS-specific funding to causes that focus on maternal and child health.

“Africa is obviously a vast and varied continent and those articles seemed to focus on other countries, but the danger of reduced funding is a real threat to the great momentum that currently exists,” Bangs says. “Hopefully the Global Fund and PEPFAR (another crucial US program) will receive the continued support they need. Keeping pressure on your elected officials to maintain our current national support to the Global Fund would be a great step.”

The medicine, as it turns out, is no longer cost prohibitive.

“The cost was generally around 42 cents…per day,” Bangs said. “It was remarkable how such simple and inexpensive treatment could make such a radical difference to people living or dying.”

Much of “The Lazarus Effect” will depict the radical difference treatment can make in the lives of AIDS patient. One segment which didn’t make it to the final cut shows Lloyd, a man bedridden during the initial filming process, gain access to retorviral medication and three months later, redo the roof on his home. It’s just one example of how treatment can make all the difference in the lives of those infected.

“To me, the film was a success when the people represented in it were able to see screenings in Zambia and reacted so positively, and when people who work directly with the issues on a policy level here in the US were so supportive,” Bangs said. “I’m proud of the film, I want as broad an audience as possible to see it, and I believe YouTube is making it available to a huge audience for free.”

“The Lazarus Effect” will air on HBO at 9 p.m. EST tonight.

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