Rio Tinto HIV/AIDS strategy
Rio Tinto recognizes the impact HIV/Aids is having on our workforce, their families and on the communities in which we operate.
The impact of the epidemic is not confined to Africa; Rio Tinto's operations in India, Indonesia and Eastern Europe are also seeing the prevalence of HIV increasing around them.
Rio Tinto acknowledges the important role that the mining industry has in trying to combat this epidemic and in response we developed an HIV/Aids strategy in 2003 that was required to be implemented by all our sub Saharan operations. In 2006, the strategy was reviewed and updated to reflect the global impact of the epidemic, and in 2008, elements of the strategy were converted into our eleventh health performance standard, required to be implemented wherever HIV poses a significant risk.
Our workplace response to HIV/Aids is founded on the principles of non-discrimination and has four key components:
1. Prevention, awareness and education
2. Voluntary counseling and testing (VCT)
3. Wellness, counseling and treatment
4. Monitoring and evaluation
The leadership drive to ensure that all our employees know their status continues. Importantly we aim to ensure that all employees and their nominated partner have affordable access to treatment, care and support, including anti retroviral medications (ARVs), through company sponsored medical aid programmes; this remains confidential between employee and treatment provider. Ultimately though, the success of our workplace programmes will be influenced by the ability of our surrounding communities to develop effective prevention and treatment responses to the HIV epidemic. We therefore support our communities to enhance their capacity to develop sustainable HIV programmes. This commitment was reflected in the awarding of a commendation to Rio Tinto by the Global Business Coalition on HIV/Aids, TB and Malaria in 2008 in the category of Expanded Community Initiatives.
On a broader scale, Rio Tinto acknowledges the enormous cost of supplying and supporting universal access to ARVs across developing countries and that in the long term, the development of a prophylactic (prevention) vaccine is required to defeat this epidemic. However, we believe that this is at least a decade away. In the meantime, Rio Tinto is a member of private sector initiative, supporting research into a therapeutic (for treatment as opposed to prevention) HIV/Aids vaccine in South Africa. African countries have had great success in reducing disease burden through vaccination programmes and we believe that the development of a therapeutic vaccine is an important intermediate step to complement ARV roll out, whilst awaiting the development of a prophylactic vaccine. The first patient was enrolled in this trial in December 2008.