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AIDS 2010: Halving HIV/TB Co-infection Deaths - Thursday, July 22, 2010 |
UNAIDS and the Stop TB Partnership joined together on Thursday at the International AIDS Conference-AIDS 2010 in Vienna, Austria, with the goal of preventing 200,000 deaths annually from HIV and tuberculosis co-infection, Agence France-Presse reports. TB is the number one killer of people living with HIV/AIDS (Ingham, 7/22).
The organizations "agreed to step up joint efforts to halve by 2015 the number of people living with HIV who die from" TB, according to the U.N. News Centre. The agreement also "aims to provide life-saving antiretroviral treatment for all TB patients living with HIV," the news service notes (7/22).
"Stop TB and UNAIDS will press government health programmes to reach all people in need of care for TB/HIV by integrating the services that provide diagnosis and treatment for both conditions; and also seek to increase the resources needed to accomplish this goal. Another overarching objective is to galvanize civil society organizations, communities affected by TB and HIV and the private sector to form strong partnerships aimed at jointly addressing TB/HIV," a UNAIDS press release states (7/22).
"This is completely unacceptable. TB is a preventable and curable disease," said Jorge Sampaio, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's special envoy for TB prevention, who presided over the signing of the memorandum, AFP reports.
"We are talking about a massive human tragedy," Marcos Espinal, the executive secretary of Stop TB, said. "African countries in particular have been devastated by co-infection," he said, adding that several billion dollars would be required to reach the 2015 target, but that a lot of the money could come from existing funds. "There is a package of activities that if properly implemented by countries will work," he said.
UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibe said, "We already have the tools to keep people living with HIV from dying of TB" (7/22).
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| Reprinted with permission from kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report atkaisernetwork.org - daily reports |
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