Complacency kills: why can ' t we back down from the HIV and AIDS response
Pamela Nash MP, Member of Parliament for Airdrie and Shotts
Pamela is the Member of Parliament for Airdrie and Shotts in Scotland, having been elected as the“ baby of the House” at the age of 25 in 2010. She has been Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on HIV and AIDS since June 2011. Before being elected to Parliament Pamela worked in Westminster as a Parliamentary Assistant to John Reid MP. Pamela also served as a Member of the Scottish Youth Parliament between June 2007 and 2009. As part of her parliamentary work she is Private Parliamentary Secretary to the Northern Ireland Shadow Cabinet team.
http:// pamelanash. com / Twitter- @ pamela _ nash
30 years ago the world was struck by the sudden onset of a new disease. People were dying without explanation, in their thousands in San Francisco, Africa, Europe and all over the world. AIDS was labelled as the“ gay plague” in the west, and many leaders failed to acknowledge that a devastating pandemic was happening on their doorsteps.
The end of AIDS
But now the picture has changed. HIV is no longer the death sentence it once was, and if treated in time, people infected with the HIV virus can live long and healthy lives. There are now over 34 million people living around the world with the HIV virus 1, including almost 100,000 in the UK 2. We have the tools and the knowledge to ensure that many HIV negative children are born to HIV positive mothers- something which would have been unthinkable 15 years ago. At the end of last year the World Health Organisation reported that increased access to HIV services resulted in a 15 % reduction of new infections over the past decade and a 22 % decline in AIDS-related deaths in the last five years 3.
Moreover, the results of a remarkable clinical trial in 2011 proved that HIV treatment can be 96 % effective in preventing the transmission of HIV. By scaling up access to life-saving anti-retroviral drugs we can now break the cycle of new infections. This new evidence, combined with UNAIDS modelling which highlights how the implementation of evidence based HIV interventions can save 7 million lives and avert 12 million new infections by 2020, means that we could, for the first time talk credibly about reversing the rising tide of new infections, and bringing about an end to AIDS 4.
1
World Health Organisation( 2013), Geneva URL: http:// www. who. int / features / qa / 71 / en / index. html
2 Health Protection Agency, UK( 2012), http:// www. hpa. org. uk / NewsCentre / NationalPressReleases / 2011PressReleases / 110606HIV /
3 UNAIDS( 2011) World AIDS day report, Geneva 4
Schwartlander et al,( 2011)” Towards an improved investment approach for an effective response to HIV / AIDS” The Lancet, June 2011. URL: http:// www. thelancet. com / journals / lancet / article / PIIS0140-6736( 11) 60702-2 / abstract revolutionise. it 40