Speaking to News At Ten at a major HIV conference in the city of Durban, South Africa he also praised Prince Harry.
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Sir Elton John meets delegates at a HIV conference in Durban. Demonstrating the USA government’s leadership toward reaching this goal, today, PEPFAR, in partnership with Johnson & Johnson and ViiV Healthcare, announced investing a combined $85 million investment to support 56 DREAMS Innovation Challenge winners* in 10 sub-Saharan African countries.
Britain’s Prince Harry, right, shares the stage with British musician Elton John, left, at the 2016 International World AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, Thursday July 21, 2016.
An estimated 80, 000 individuals from Uganda and Kenya participated in the study aimed at encouraging people to determine the status of the HIV virus in their bloodstream.
AIDS epidemic was in its prime during the 1980s and 1990s.
The fifth-in-line to the throne has visited a number of HIV clinics in recent months, and has also spoken about his late mother’s work on the issue.
The number of new HIV infections in Cambodia almost doubled over the past decade-the greatest increase in Asia-while less than a third of Cambodians living with the virus are receiving medication to slow its development, according to a report released this week.
“If we don’t have a strong health system, then health workers will not be able to reach those people where they are, will not be able to give treatment to those millions of people who are waiting”, he bemoaned.
“The findings of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015 on HIV reveal challenges that the global health community faces in the effort to end AIDS by 2030, among other global goals”, lead author Dr Haidong Wang, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, tells SBS.
More than 1,000 Kenyan and Ugandan couples took part in the two-year project where the HIV positive partner, two-thirds of whom were women, took antiretroviral therapy (ARV) and the HIV negative one took pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).
“More than 95 percent of the HIV infections that we expected to see, we did not see”. Worldwide, new HIV infections fell just 0.7% a year between 2005 and 2015, compared to 2.7% a year between 1997 and 2005.
“We have to make testing more accessible and South Africa is leading by example in this”, Gates said.
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It says that in southern Africa, more than one percent of the populations of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland were becoming infected with HIV. Last year, south Asia had 8.5 percent (212,500) of new infections; southeast Asia, 4.7 percent (117,500); and east Asia, 2.3 percent (57,500).
