PRINCE Harry’s campaign to raise awareness about HIV will move to the worldwide stage today when he arrives in South Africa to attend a global conference about Aids.
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Following in his mother, Princess Diana’s footsteps, Prince Harry says the people who have been leading the fight against HIV and Aids are getting old and the youth needs to ready itself to take the baton.
“It is impossible to say exactly how far we are, but one thing we can say is that over the last seven years we have made important strides in the direction of getting a vaccine”, he said, “but getting an HIV vaccine will probably be one of the most important and hard scientific challenges in all of HIV research”.
“If you don’t, this campaign to end AIDS will be a disaster”, said Elton John. And with that drift of attention, we risk a real drift of funding and of action to beat the virus.
South Africans woke up this morning to the headline “HIV mugs 500,000” on the front page of one of this nation’s most influential newspapers, The Times. In my own country, infection rates are still rising amongst important groups despite the availability of instant testing and universal access to treatment.
There is much more work to do, though – there are still many children born with HIV and who feel disenfranchised, he said, and ignoring them may mean the “great work” in the last decades will have “come to nothing”.
Nuon Sidara, a project coordinator at the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, said that while the government had been successful in stemming an HIV epidemic in the 1990s, it needed to do more to halt the current rise in infections.
HIV remains a major public health problem in San Diego County, where about 20,000 residents are living with the virus that causes AIDS, according to county health statistics.
The prince, who publicly took an HIV test earlier this month, said the world can not lose the sense of urgency in fighting the disease.
When my friend Prince Seeiso and I founded Sentebale, we saw early on that children living with HIV grapple with several medical, emotional and social challenges all at once.
The two princes watched as their organisation’s staff and youth volunteers explained how residential camps, monthly Saturday clubs and caregiver days help educate families and communities on supporting young people in their care with HIV.
“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.
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The British royal spoke at the International AIDS Conference in South Africa on Thursday.
