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Top United Nations officials have stressed the need to put in more efforts to eradicate HIV/AIDS and highlighted in particular the need to expand services and scale up resources.
“Together we must act strategically and effectively to achieve the vision of a world with zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths,” the General Assembly President, Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, said in remarks to an Assembly meeting held to review progress following last year’s high-level meeting on HIV and AIDS.
In the remarks, delivered by Acting President and Ambassador of Benin Jean-Francis Zinsou, Mr. Al-Nasser said that the world was “riding a wave of renewed hope and accelerating progress against HIV.”
There had been dramatic reductions in new infections in the hardest-hit countries, and among young people worldwide, as well as a scaling up of treatments in low- and middle-income countries in the past decade, he noted.
“Yet, critical challenges remain,” the President said, and added that HIV still disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, and funding was in decline, threatening the ability of the world community to sustain necessary progress.
“We must ensure that the commitments that were made are implemented, so that we can re-direct the course of the epidemic, and avert future costs to society,” he said.
At last year’s high-level meeting, Member States adopted a political declaration committing themselves to ambitious new targets to combat HIV/ AIDS, with the aim of ridding the world of a disease that has claimed more than 30 million lives since the virus was first identified three decades ago.
