US five-year plan to fight AIDS to focus on HIV prevention

Dec 1, 2009, 22:52 GMT

Washington - In its five-year strategy to tackle the global AIDS epidemic, the United States said Tuesday that it would shift its focus from an emergency response to programmes that can be sustained by national governments.

While the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), provided life-saving anti-retroviral therapy for 2.4 million people in 2009 alone, unmet needs remained the dominant feature of the programme, said Eric Goosby, the US Global AIDS Coordinator Ambassador on World AIDS Day.

According to the US State Department, in 2009, PEPFAR also provided critical care to 11 million people and counselling and testing for an estimated 29 million people.

But critical gaps persist. The United Nations says there are an estimated 33 million people living with HIV globally, and 2.7 million new infections and 2 million deaths annually.

PEPFAR, initiated by president George W Bush in 2003, is the single largest US foreign aid programme for health ever. From 2004- 2008, the United States invested nearly 19 billion dollars in PEPFAR, with an additional 6.6 billion dollars in 2009.

The US Congress reauthorized PEPFAR in July 2008, boosting funding to 48 billion dollars through 2013. The president's budget for financial year 2010 requested 6.7 billion dollars for PEPFAR.

But the US would transition the programme from an emergency response to a focus on preventing HIV and building healthcare systems in vulnerable nations.

'Unmet needs are still the dominant feature of this programme (PEPFAR),' said Goosby. 'For every two people we've put on this treatment, five more have become infected.'

Treatment would now be focused on certain populations, especially pregnant women who are ill, HIV-infected pregnant women and those infected with tuberculosis.

'We're going to scale up highly effective prevention interventions like male circumcision, prevention of mother-to-child transmission,' said Goosby. 'We're going to work with countries to determine not just how many people are infected in their communities, in their countries, but where the new infections are occurring.'

The State Department also announced Tuesday that PEPFAR and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria would jointly support anti-retroviral therapy for 3.7 million of the estimated 4 million people in low- and middle-income countries who are currently on treatment.