The first two recipients of funding from the Elton John Aids Foundation and the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Fund have been announced in Durban.
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With at least six per cent prevalence rate, Kenya is also one of a small set of countries where HIV prevalence was more than 2.5 per cent of the population in 2015.
“In the 2015 HIV estimates, we had 72,000 new HIV infections among adults”.
Africa is the continent hardest hit by the epidemic, but the subject of homosexuality is taboo in many African countries.
While the deaths from HIV infections have been on a decline, the number of people infected has increased in the last 10 years, a recent global study on the auto-immune disease have revealed.
Further, the proportion of people living with HIV on Antiretroviral therapy (ART) have increased rapidly between 2005 and 2015, from 6.4 per cent to 38.6 per cent for men, and from 3.3 per cent to 42.4 per cent for women. “If you don’t, this campaign to end AIDS will be a disaster”, said Elton John.
He is the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and was the founding executive director of UNAids. We knew that just focusing on the physical effects of the disease wasn’t enough – a child with unaddressed depression or traumatic stress from bereavement, poverty, and discrimination is not a child who is likely to stick with their treatment programme.
Research groups working in South Africa and Namibia reported on efforts to monitor the cascade, and local performance, highlighting several common problems across the region, at a Tuesday session during the 21 International AIDS Conference. Many studies have shown that people with HIV who receive proper and early access to treatment can reduce viral loads to the point where those with the infection do not pass it on to their sex partners.
“I am optimistic that we can bring an end to Aids”, Gates told a session about accelerating the decline of the burden and incidence of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.
He said: “Over the last decade working in Lesotho [through charity Sentebale], I’ve seen first hand the unbelievable progress that has been made in treating the physical and mental effects of HIV”.
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The grants are meant to help community organizations expand efforts to prevent the spread of HIV and efforts to treat people with HIV and AIDS.
