London (Reuters) – the international community has made progress extraordinary in the last decade in the fight against AIDS, but a funding crisis is jeopardising those achievements, said Wednesday the health agencies of Nations United.
A report led by the World Health Organization said that the virus of human immunodeficiency (HIV) that causes AIDS and around now infects 34 million people throughout the world proved to be a “formidable challenge” for scientists and health experts public.
“But the trend is changing,” he added. “The tools to achieve an AIDS-free generation are in our hands”.
However, a serious crisis of funding in the largest sponsor of the world in the fight against AIDS and a decline in the money provided by international donors to fight the disease is making dent in the optimism in the community of HIV/AIDS on an eventual end of the pandemic.
The annual programme of HIV/AIDS funding was reduced to $ 15 billion (11.270 million euros) in 2010 from 15,900 billion in 2009, well below the estimated 22-24,000 million dollars to the UN agencies say they are needed by 2015 to pay for a comprehensive global response and effective.
The Global Fund against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, of public-private character and major sponsor of the world for the treatment of HIV and prevention programmes, said last week that was going to cancel the new grants for countries fighting against these diseases and would not have any new funding available until 2014.
In an interview with Reuters in London while the report of the UN agencies was made public, Gottfried Hirnschall, director of the HIV/AIDS who said that the breakthrough in reducing the number of new HIV infections and a dramatic increase in access to AIDS drugs of this a critical moment in the battle.
Scientists from the past year studies have also shown that if the people who have HIV is treated in time against AIDS could reduce significantly the number of people who are infected with the virus.
“This is a year really exciting, because we are seeing a downward trend in those areas in which we want to see trends downward – new infections and mortality – and we are seeing trends upward where we would like to see them, especially in coverage (of treatment) rates,” said Hirnschall.
The latest figures from the report on Wednesday and a global study of UNAIDS known last week show that the number of new HIV infections fell to 2.7 million in 2010, compared to 3.1 million in 2001, while the number of people receiving anti-AIDS drugs increased to 6.65 million in 2010 only 400,000 in 2003.
Hirnschall said the data suggested that the aim of the who – having zero new infections and zero deaths and zero HIV stigma – “could be in the not too distant future become a reality”.
But the big risk lies in financing, he said.
“We have a deficit of $ 7 billion for this year and what is even more alarming is that we also had almost $ 1 billion less this year from the previous year”.
With many major international donor countries struggling with the recession and debt crisis, Hirnschall said that it was crucial for the countries affected by HIV/AIDS do our utmost to finance their own programmes and make limited resources go further beyond.
The report on Wednesday, published on the occasion of the World AIDS Day on December 1 by the who, the Nations United against AIDS (UNAIDS) programme and the Fund of United Nations for children (UNICEF) said that programmes of treatment, prevention and dissemination were increasingly effective, integrated health clinics services and find local communities more effective ways to get drugs for patients with HIV.
“However, financial pressures… are threatening the impressive progress to date”, said, adding that the reduction in funding was a “deeply disturbing trend”.
