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Eight Million People Now Being
Treated for HIV
MARIO RITTER: And I’m Mario Ritter. The
nineteenth International AIDS
Conference took place last month in
Washington, DC. More than twenty thousand
people attended the six-day event.
Today, we tell about some of the latest
developments in the fight against AIDS
and HIV, the virus that causes the disease.
(MUSIC)
BARBARA KLEIN: More than eight million
people around the world are now
receiving antiretroviral drug therapy.
That is a twenty percent increase over the
past year. All those receiving the
treatment have the human immunodeficiency
virus, known as HIV.
The Joint United Nations Program on
HIV/AIDS released a report before the AIDS
conference. The report is called
“Together We Will End AIDS.” It says
almost one
point four million people
were added to the number of people receiving
treatment
in last year alone.
More than thirty-four
million people are now living with HIV. The report
says that is
the largest number ever,
because of the greater availability of life-saving
drugs.
But about two-point-five million
people were newly-infected with the virus last
year.
MARIO RITTER: Michel
Sidibe is the head of the Joint United Nations
Program on
HIV/AIDS, also called
UNAIDS.
MICHEL SIDIBE: “I
personally
believe that it is a new era
-- new era for treatment,
new era for
prevention. But it is also from my personal
reading a beginning of a
journey to
getting to zero.”
Michel Sidibe says the world is now in
a time of shared responsibility, mutual
accountability and global solidarity.
He says those issues will influence the
discussion about HIV/AIDS in the coming
years.
International
spending for the fight against HIV reached almost
seventeen billion
dollars last year.
Mr. Sidibe says the money was spent effectively.
MICHEL SIDIBE: “We are
talking more and more of cost
-
effectiveness, efficiency,
reducing
unit costs of producing any results. We are trying
to make sure that the
framework,
investment framework, we are using with the
countries becomes
smarter
.”
BARBARA KLEIN: Many
countries have greatly increased their own
investment in
fighting the disease.
Spending by individual countries is now greater
than
international spending for the
first time. For example, South Africa spent two
billion dollars last year in the fight
against HIV/AIDS.
Much of
the international aid for treatment, research and
prevention comes from
PEPFAR --
the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS
Relief and the Global Fund
to Fight
AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Eric Goosby is the
United
States’ Global AIDS Coordinator. He also leads
PEPFAR.
ERIC
GOOSBY: “Our resource allocation and
prioritization
-- shifts that over the
last three years we have aggressively
tried to institute in our PEPFAR programs --
have begun to show the fruit of that
labor. Moving to high risk populations -
targeting key populations -- to ensure
that they are identified in a safe setting, in a
safe space, to allow them to be entered
and retained in care over time.”
PEPFAR works with national
governments to create programs for their people.
ERIC GOOSBY: “I think that
the numbers that UNAIDS is presenting to the world
reassure me that we are positioned to
know, monitor and understand the data as it
comes in. And we have moved I think
over the last few years to be much more
nimble in our ability to reposition our
programming.”
MARIO RITTER: But there is still much
work to be done. UNAIDS says billions of
dollars more will be needed for the
fight against HIV/AIDS. The UN group says
one point seven million people died
from AIDS-related causes last year. That is
twenty-four percent fewer deaths than
in two thousand five, when the number of
deaths was at its highest.
Tuberculosis -- or TB -- is the number
one cause of death among people living
with HIV. People suffering from
HIV/AIDS have weakened natural defenses for
fighting disease. That increases their
likelihood of getting TB.
BARBARA KLEIN: People between the ages
of fifteen and twenty-four are
responsible for forty percent of all
new adult HIV infections. Most of those
infections are among young women.
Studies have shown that many young people
do not know how to prevent HIV
infection.