United States Shifting to a Sustainable AIDS Response
Washington â€" Prevention, education programs and rapid access to HIV/AIDS medications will remain a mainstay of efforts to curb and prevent the global spread of the deadly disease, but renewed efforts must also include increased public awareness, reduced stigma for its victims and getting sustainable services to people at earlier stages, says Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
(Media-Newswire.com) - Washington — Prevention, education programs and rapid access to HIV/AIDS medications will remain a mainstay of efforts to curb and prevent the global spread of the deadly disease, but renewed efforts must also include increased public awareness, reduced stigma for its victims and getting sustainable services to people at earlier stages, says Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“Obviously, our efforts are hampered whenever discrimination or marginalization of certain populations results in less effective outreach and treatment,” Clinton said November 30.
On December 1, World AIDS Day, Ambassador Eric Goosby, the U.S. global AIDS coordinator, announced that the United States is launching a new five-year strategy that will move the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief ( PEPFAR ), first launched by former President George W. Bush in 2003, from an emergency response to one of durable health systems that are designed to serve the medical needs of people with HIV/AIDS and the communities where they live.
“We’re going to begin transitioning from an emergency response to a sustainable one through greater engagement with and capacity building of governments,” Goosby said during a press briefing. PEPFAR has had success through its partnership program, Goosby said, but more is needed, especially in supporting the creation of a midlevel government capability to oversee, manage and eventually finance these programs.
EXPAND PREVENTION PROGRAMS
Goosby said the United States is going to scale up highly effective prevention programs, such as male circumcision and prevention of mother-to-child transmission. In addition, he said, the United States is going to use geographical mapping and understanding where people are and to where they migrate to help make decisions on targeting where prevention programs can be most effective.
“You can put your programs in front of that expanding movement of the virus through the population,” he said. “We’re going to work with countries to determine not just how many people are infected in their communities, in their countries, but where the new infections are occurring.”
“With treatment, we will continue a strategic scale-up of services to more than 4 million people,” Goosby added. And part of the objective of the expanded PEPFAR program will be to strengthen broader health systems, he said.
Goosby said that in 2009 alone PEPFAR has supported life-saving HIV/AIDS medications for more than 2.4 million people, essential care for nearly 11 million people and counseling and testing for nearly 29 million people. During the year, efforts to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV have resulted in the birth of 100,000 disease-free babies to HIV-positive mothers, he said. That, Goosby said, builds on the nearly 240,000 babies born HIV-free over the past five years.
“But unmet needs are still the dominant feature of this program,” Goosby said. “We have gotten through approximately a third of the population that is in need of care and the millions who are participating in high-risk behaviors who need prevention, intervention.”
There are an estimated 33 million people living with HIV, with 2.7 million new infections annually and approximately 2 million deaths a year.
“For every two people we put on treatment, five more become infected,” Goosby said.
Goosby said the United States remains committed to preventing interruptions in treatment, which have happened in PEPFAR. “We are also looking to get those who are most ill … on anti-retrovirals [AIDS medications] as early as we can meet them, stage them, remove the confounder of opportunistic infections and engage in anti-retroviral therapy,” he said.
The United States remains fully committed to that and to expanding treatment capability, he said. “Our commitment to universal coverage, we’ve never stopped,” he said. “We are a central component of that effort to get everyone who needs these drugs on these drugs.”
LATEST RESULTS
The PEPFAR program and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria announced December 1 that the programs are jointly supporting AIDS treatment for nearly 3.7 million of the estimated 4 million people in low- and middle-income countries who receive treatment globally. And approximately 1.3 million people receive treatment supported through both PEPFAR’s bilateral programs and the Global Fund, according to the State Department.
These numbers reflect the strong country-level partnership between PEPFAR and the Global Fund, the department said.
Under PEPFAR, the U.S. government already has committed more than $25 billion to fight against global HIV/AIDS, according to the State Department. The United States remains the largest donor to the Global Fund, contributing $3.5 billion to date, with additional pledges that will bring the total U.S. government contribution to $4.5 billion.
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