President
Barack Obama vowed to boost U.S. efforts to fight AIDS with a new
target of providing treatment to 6 million people worldwide by 2013, up
from an earlier goal of 4 million. At a celebrity-studded World AIDS Day
event yesterday, Obama also challenged other nations to boost their
commitments to fund treatment. “We can beat this disease. We can win
this fight. We just have to keep at it, today, tomorrow, and every day
until we get to zero,” Obama said at the forum, where he credited his
Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, for his efforts to combat AIDS
and HIV. Bush, who sought to make the fight against AIDS and HIV a
signature issue of his presidency, spoke by satellite to the Washington
event sponsored by the ONE campaign. New HIV infections fell to 2.7
million in 2010, down from 3.1 million in 2001, while the total number
of people getting life-saving AIDS drugs rose to 6.65 million in 2010
from just 400,000 in 2003. But that is still a minority of the 34
million people around the world who had the human immunodeficiency virus
in 2010. Studies have also shown that suppressing the virus through
treatment reduces HIV’s spread to patients’ partners by as much as 96%.
As part of a goal to achieve “an AIDS-free generation,” Obama said the
United States aimed to provide anti-retroviral drugs to more than 1.5
million HIV-positive pregnant women worldwide by 2013.
