WASHINGTON - 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." — Agence France Presse
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