The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS says more than 18 million people worldwide are being treated for HIV-AIDS. Twelve million of them are in Africa.
Our reporter Coletta Wanjohi sat down with Dr. Pride Chigwedere, senior UNAIDS adviser to the African Union, who said information is still the "starting point" in preventing the spread of the disease.
How is the African continent doing when we talk about prevention for HIV/AIDS as opposed to treatment?
"There has been a lot of progress that has been made especially in treatment. Now as we turned into the new century there were less than 1 million people on ARV drugs but we have moved to 18 million people on treatment. This is a global figure. More than 12 million of them are in the continent of Africa. However in terms of prevention there has been some progress although we are not on track to meeting the targets that have been set for 2020. The new infections on the continent have decreased by about 40% from the peak in 1997. The new numbers that we have are that there were approximately 2 million new infections in 2015, 1.4 million of those new infections were in Africa. But if we look closely at the data just for the last 5 years, the number hasn’t changed. The number has been approximately constant and therefore there is this focus on prevention because we are not making as much progress as we should on prevention," Dr. Pride said.
We have a lot of awareness being created to the population in Africa as far as prevention is concerned but where do we still have loopholes of infection?
"So HIV prevention there is no magic bullet that applies to all the geographies and populations at the same time. So the information is important. That is the starting point people have to know that HIV exists, how is it transmitted how do I protect myself, but that is insufficient. We have to look at the different categories of people that are getting infected and we start out with mother to child transmission. And we are still at about 100,000 infections passed on to babies every year and yet the target is to reach to less that 20,000 each year. The adolescents and young people are getting infected. There is data to show that particularly young girls in eastern and Southern Africa are 2 to 3 times more at risk compared to boys. And then when we move to the adult age group men and women are getting infected. There are particular populations at risk if we look at the statics for sex workers , some of the statistics indicate that sex workers are 5 to 10 times more at risk compared to the general population. But there are also other key populations at risk of getting HIV infections," Dr. Pride said.
