Jakarta Globe, November 30, 2012
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton introduced Thursday a plan to realize an AIDS-free generation. (AFP Photo) |
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Washington,
DC. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unveiled Thursday an ambitious US
blueprint on how to realize the dream of an AIDS-free generation, aiming to see
virtually no babies born with HIV by 2015.
“Scientific
advances and their successful implementation have brought the world to a
tipping point in the fight against AIDS,” the 54-page document says.
Speaking at
a launch to mark World AIDS Day, Clinton stressed that challenges still exist
as the global community seeks to “change the course of this pandemic and usher
in an AIDS-free generation.”
But
although HIV may still be around into the future, “the disease that it causes
need not be,” Clinton said.
Antiretroviral
drugs have been hugely successful in cutting the rate of HIV transmission from
pregnant women to their unborn babies or via breast-feeding, as well as in
helping HIV-positive patients from developing AIDS.
Some 1.7
million people still die every year from AIDS-related illnesses.
But in the
vision of an AIDS-free generation, almost no child is born with HIV; as they
grow up, they are at lower risk of becoming infected; and if they do get HIV,
they have access to treatment to halt its progression towards AIDS.
New HIV
infections among children and adults around the world have fallen by 19 percent
over the past decade, and AIDS-related deaths by 26 percent since a peak in
2005.
“As we continue
to drive down the number of new infections, and drive up the number of people
on treatment, eventually we will be able to treat more people than become
infected every year. That will be the tipping point,” Clinton said.
“We will
then get ahead of the pandemic and an AIDS-free generation will be in our
sight.”
US Global
AIDS coordinator Eric Goosby told AFP that the 390,000 children currently born
every year with HIV primarily lived in about 22 countries, mostly in
sub-Saharan Africa.
Taking a
cocktail of three antiretroviral drugs cut the risk of a mother transmitting
HIV to her baby to less than two percent, he said. It also allowed her to
breast-feed and protected her in future pregnancies in countries where many
women had between five to seven children.
“Now we
will not get to zero,” Goosby warned, saying many women in developing countries
never enter prenatal care. But he hoped by 2015 that the numbers of babies born
with HIV would drop globally below 40,000.
In a moving
speech, South African Florence Ngobeni-Allen, an ambassador for the Elizabeth
Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation who is HIV-positive, spoke of losing her own
daughter and husband to AIDS.
“Losing a
child to AIDS is the worst thing that a mother can go through. I’ve told this
story so many times, but it still feels like yesterday,” she said.
Her pain
turned to joy, once she had remarried and gave birth to two HIV-negative sons,
the oldest of whom is now six.
“Let’s not
give up, for the fight is far from over... I dream of a generation born free of
HIV. I know it’s real because my children are part of it. I’m proof of it, and
I am proud of that,” she said.
“These are
encouraging trends, but more work needs to be done,” says the report, drawn up
by the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
Under the
road map, the United States will:
- Work
towards the elimination of new HIV infections in children by 2015 and keeping
their mothers alive;
- Increase
its coverage of HIV treatment to cut the number of deaths from AIDS and boost
HIV prevention, including antiretroviral drugs. President Barack Obama has set
a goal of treating some six million people with such drugs by the end of 2013;
- Increase
the numbers of men that get circumcisions. By the end of fiscal year 2013,
PEPFAR aims to have supported such operations for some 4.7 million men in
eastern and southern Africa;
- Step up
access to testing and counseling, as well as to condoms and other prevention
methods.
The
blueprint stressed though that underpinning all these efforts would be
scientific advances, adding the US will support innovative research into ways
of prevention, as well as helping to halt the progression of the disease.
“In every
setting, in every country, really in every city... we are on a continuum
towards an AIDS-free generation,” Goosby said.
“There’s an
aggregate and a kind of cumulative reflection of that for a country, and a
world. But it is an individual march for each person and for each population.”
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