On World AIDS Day, US officials announced a new five-year plan that will refocus the nation's overseas AIDS-fighting efforts. This new direction will shift the program's emphasis toward achieving long-term, sustainable improvements in prevention, treatment, and care.
"We're going to begin transitioning from an emergency response to a sustainable one through greater engagement with and capacity-building of governments," said Dr. Eric Goosby, the global AIDS coordinator who oversees the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). For instance, the Obama administration will encourage partner governments' ministries of health, education and finance to take over management of PEPFAR efforts and increase financial support for them, Goosby said.
"We're going to scale-up highly effective prevention interventions like male circumcision [and] prevention of mother-to-child transmission," Goosby said. "We're going to work with countries to determine not just how many people are infected, but where the new infections are occurring."
"With treatment, we will continue a strategic scale-up of services to more than 4 million people," said Goosby. "In 2009 alone, PEPFAR has supported life-saving antiretroviral therapy for more than 2.4 million people, essential care to nearly 11 million people, and counseling and testing for nearly 29 million people."
PEPFAR's interventions have prevented 100,000 mother-to-child HIV infections during the past year and nearly 240,000 such infections during the past five years, Goosby said. PEPFAR's five-year goal is to double the number of mother-to-child HIV transmissions prevented.
For more information about the five-year plan, visit http://www.pepfar.gov/documents/organization/133035.pdf.
12/01/09
GLOBAL: US Unveils Five-Year Plan to Fight AIDS Worldwide
Source: Agence France Presse; Courtesy of the CDC National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention