The new AIDS treatment access numbers released by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 17th April are a grave warning about the state of AIDS treatment scale-up, warn the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition. In the last 12 months, treatment access grew by 700,000 to a total of two million people, but many millions more remain in urgent need of antiretroviral therapy. At this rate of expansion, the WHO report explains, the world will fall five million people short of the internationally declared and reaffirmed universal treatment access target of 9.8 million on treatment by 2010.

“The significant progress outlined in this report in scaling up access to treatment is a positive step forward for many countries in achieving their ambitious goals of universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support,” said Dr Peter Piot, Executive Director of UNAIDS. “However new data in the report also shows that there is still a long way to go,” he added.

The Director General of WHO, Dr Margaret Chan said, “We need ambitious national programmes, much greater global mobilization and increased accountability if we are going to succeed.”

To read the full report visit:
http://www.who.int/hiv/mediacentre/univeral_access_progress_report_en.pdf

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 3:49 pm and is filed under Campaign News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.