Kenya to showcase HIV progress in major New York meeting

Health CS Cleopa Mailu during the opening of the 69th World Health Assembly on Monday May 23, 2016 at the UN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Mailu is now in New York to tell the world about Kenya’s fight against HIV.

Kenya to showcase HIV progress in major New York meeting

Health Cabinet Secretary Cleopa Mailu is expected to showcase Kenya’s tremendous progress in the fight against HIV at a major UN meeting in New York this week.

Mailu and the Kenyan delegation left the country on Tuesday for the UN High-Level Meeting on Ending AIDS, which began on Wednesday and ends on Friday.

Also in the delegation is the National Aids Control Council director Dr Nduku Kilonzo.

Mailu said Kenya has halved the rate of new infections from 13 per cent to the current six per cent since the peak of the epidemic 20 years ago.

“The transmission of mother-to-child has reduced and 900,000 people are currently accessing anti-retroviral treatment,” he said.

The UN meeting, which focuses accelerating the response to HIV over the next five years, will set the world on course to end the Aids epidemic by 2030, as part of the Sustainable Development Goals.

United Nations members states are also expected to adopt a political declaration on ending Aids to scale-up the pace of progress and reach a set of time-bound targets.

Among the global targets is to have less than 500,000 new HIV infections annually in addition to less than 500,000 people dying from AIDS-related causes by 2020.

The world also plans to eliminate HIV-related discrimination in the next four years.

Worldwide, it is estimated that 22 million people living with HIV, without access to treatment.

An extra 50 per cent of the world’s population is living with the virus unknowingly.

Source:http://www.the-star.co.ke