SEQUIM — A pop star from Sequim has thrown his celebrity behind a social media campaign asking pharmaceutical companies and governments to work together to provide antiviral medications to everyone afflicted with HIV/AIDS around the globe.
Wesley Stromberg, 21, of Hollywood Hills, Calif. — front man of reggae pop band Emblem3 — this week visited the United Nations building in New York to promote the #TreatmentForAll campaign.
The social media campaign was launched Tuesday as part of World AIDS Day, and encourages the public to use the hashtag #TreatmentForAll on their online posts to spread the message that everyone who is HIV positive needs and deserves treatment regardless of cost.
Stromberg was raised in Sequim and moved to California at the age of 16 after earning a General Educational Development (GED) certificate.
The campaign is led by a coalition consisting of the United States Government President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, Facebook and various other groups around the world, according to the UN.
The movement’s shared goal is to ensure treatment for 28 million people by 2020.
“We are the generation who can change the world and can fix this and it is our duty to fix this for the future,” Stromberg said Tuesday afternoon from New York City.
“AIDS could be gone forever if we all pay attention to it.”
The #TreatmentForAll campaign is intended to spread that message to a billion people, supporters say.
On Tuesday, Stromberg met with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to promote the campaign.
“It was awesome,” Stromberg said of meeting Ki-moon.
According to the World Health Organization, there were approximately 36.9 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 2014.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the most affected region, with 25.8 million people living with HIV in 2014. The area accounts for almost 70 percent of the global total of new HIV infections.
HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, can lead to AIDS, or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.
Through the #TreatmentForAll campaign, supporters say they hope to achieve an 80 percent reduction in new HIV transmissions over the next five to 10 years by finding sponsors to offer expensive antiviral drugs at discounted prices to patients in Third World countries, especially Africa.
Many patients can’t afford the life-saving medications, Stromberg said, “so we need someone to sponsor” them and provide finding,
Potential sponsors include pharmaceutical companies, but government subsidies also would be welcome, he said.
“We are trying to get everybody everywhere to release this antiviral medication [to] the people who can’t afford it, to help fund it for them and to make it available for every single person,” he said.
Once considered a death sentence — accounting for about 39 million dead over the last 35 years, according the UN — HIV/AIDS is on the cusp of annihilation, said Michel Sidibé, executive director of UNAIDS, or the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS, which seeks to end the AIDS epidemic as a public health threat by 2030.
“The world is facing a fragile five-year window of opportunity to break the epidemic and keep it from rebounding,” Sidibé said in a U.N. press release.
“We will not win against AIDS without communities. They are essential partners for the future success of the AIDS response.”
The #TreatmentForAll campaign has released a 14-minute documentary about the effect the disease has had upon HIV/AIDS patients in Africa and the importance of life saving medications.
The documentary, filmed in late October, can be viewed online at http://tinyurl.com/PDN-UNAIDS.
The documentary — directed by Dewayne Jones — features Ricki Lake, Stromberg and various pop idols chosen for their social media appeal.
Stromberg said that United Nations officials approached him for the documentary because of his involvement in the Team Inspire Project.
About two years ago, Stromberg and band mate Drew Chadwick, 23, formerly of Sequim, co-founded the nonprofit organization.
The goal of Team Inspire is to lead young people to create social change “by spreading collective awareness and participating in volunteer opportunities in the community,” according to its website at http://teaminspireproject.myshopify.com/.
It now has active members in 72 countries around the globe, Stromberg said.
In the documentary, the group visits the Republic of Malawi — a landlocked country in Central Africa formerly known as Nyasaland — to see how the disease impacts people there.
At Jacaranda School, where 98 percent of the students have been orphaned by AIDS and many are infected themselves, students have been given a second chance at life because of antiviral medications, said Marie Da Silva, founder of the Jacaranda Foundation.
“We need those medications,” she said.
Inspired by the plight of those he met in Africa, Stromberg returned to the United States with the goal of convincing pharmaceutical companies to provide antiviral drugs to everyone who needs them, he said.
Former President Bill Clinton, who is interviewed in the documentary, said such treatment is crucial.
“If you want to save lives, and stop an epidemic that has already claimed tens of millions of people, treatment is the best prevention,” Clinton said. “But there also needs to be education.”
Stromberg is pleased he can use his celebrity to help provide that education, he said.
“Basically with great power comes great responsibility and through music I have gained a large following on social media,” he said.
“There is no better way to give back then to use that power to bring awareness” to the issue, and “to get it solved.”
Emblem3, which also includes Stromberg’s younger brother Keaton, 19, is now recording an album and is slated to start a tour sometime next year. For more information, visit http://www.emblem3.com/.
________
Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
