The battle against HIV AIDS in Africa is making great progress with milions of lives being saved through PEPFAR, the - U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. The achievements of the organisation have been outlined by the coordinator and Special Representative for Global Health Diplomacy, Dr John N. Nkengasong. That was during a digital press briefing on the occasion of it's 20th anniversary.
According to Dr. John N. Nkengasong PEPFAR has transformed lives drastically and changed the way HIV/AIDS is being viewed across the continent. 25 million lives have been saved 5.5 million children have been born free of HIV/AIDS, 3,000 labs have been strengthened and accredited across Africa, over 70,000 facilities have been strengthened and 340,000 health workers have been trained and are being used in the fight against HIV/AIDS and other dangerous diseases.
"Immunization rates have increased by 10 percent in countries that PEPFAR supports - that is general immunization in children. Life expectancy has bounced back to about 12 to 15 years in countries that PEPFAR has had investment. GDPs have increased by up to about 2.9 percent. So PEPFAR has not only had an impact on saving lives; it's also had a developmental impact in the countries that PEPFAR has operated in more than 20 years" he said.
As he put it, before PEPFAR only 50,000 people 50,000 people on the continent of Africa who were infected were on treatment. Fifty thousand. Today, over 20 million people are receiving life-saving antiretroviral therapy. That is remarkable, he stated.
Being the largest program in the history of
"95 percent of that has been spent on the continent of Africa. We have PEPFAR programs in Southeast Asia, like in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, India, Kazakhstan. But the majority of PEPFAR spending has been on Africa, rightfully so, because Africa carries the largest burden of HIV/AIDS in the whole world. Just to put that in context, last year there were 1.5 million new cases of HIV/ AIDS, and over 60 percent of those were in Africa. And last year of the close to 650,000 people who died of HIV/AIDS, 425,000 were in Africa. So I think that the large amount of attention and the devotion of the resources in Africa is very proportionate to the burden of the disease." Said the U.S Global AIDS Coordinator, Dr. Nkengasong.
PEPFAR has some strong plans. To accelerate the number of persons on treatment and help countries reach the “95-95-95” target, PEPFAR aims at identifying 95% of people infected and make them aware of their status. After that, the next plan will be to place them on treatment and then ensure that they attain a viral load suppression such that the virus becomes undetectable in their systems.
"We've seen the power of the virus when it's undetectable. When patients who are HIV-positive receive treatment and the virus is undetectable, it benefits the individual; it also benefits the community because transmission is almost zero. You can actually deliver, a pregnant woman who is HIV-positive, an HIV-negative baby. And then of course you lead a normal life with that." Said Dr. John Nkengasong.
Children, adolescent girls, young women, and key populations are a priority in the five-year plan to eliminate HIV/AIDS as they are more exposed to infection. In a bit to curb this, some tools are being developed.
"I am very positive of the future of the tools that are developing in the pipeline in the fight against HIV/AIDS. One is that we have a pipeline of molecules or interventions that are coming on that we're calling PrEP, which is pre-exposure prophylaxis, which actually will help us in the prevention, where injectable that the adolescent girls and young women and key pops can inject when they come, and you see them only after three months. This PrEP, this is for HIV-negative people that are at risk." Reiterated Dr. Nkengasong.
Dr. John Nkengasong ended by laying emphasis on the fact that, partnership is important in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
SA'AH SIONA IKEI, The Post Newspaper
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