South Africa and Aids-HIV: public health sector rolling out free ARVS

He said that the health workers and counsellors in the ICTC and ART centres should send HIV and AIDS patients to undergo the CB-Net tests, if they noticed weight loss or were found to be suffering from cough and fever. If untreated, the virus can advance to AIDS.

Sophie Barton-Knott, from UNAIDS, said the agency tasked with managing the global pandemic strongly believed that adopting the “fast-track approach”, an approach focusing on testing and treatment, would facilitate the end of AIDS as a public health crisis by 2030. A city health department report shows deaths and new diagnoses continued to decline and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio each announced more money toward the plan to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the state by 2020.

“We look forward to continuing to suppress it to a greater degree in upcoming years”, he said.

“To do this there needs to be a massive scale up in HIV testing – more than 17 million people living with HIV do not know their HIV status and 21.1 million people are not yet accessing treatment”, Barton-Knott said.

Although ARVs do not cure Hiv/Aids, but at least such a drug improves lives of those who suffer from it, and to some the possibility is to live longer on such medication. “It’s imperative that we work together to halt the transmission of HIV”. “The unfortunate thing for me is, we still have about 50,000 new cases each year in the united states.”, said Dr. Linda Van Etta, Infectious Disease Specialist at St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth. He said anyone who thinks they might have been exposed to HIV should get tested. Most Allegheny County cases still occur in men who have sex with men, but “we’re seeing infections across the board in a diverse population”, he said.

“Today, in this country, 1.2 million people living with HIV, almost a tenth of them here in our city”. Local collaborators include the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, Community Human Services, Macedonia F.A.C.E., Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force, University of Pittsburgh, City of Pittsburgh HIV Commission and the HIV/AIDS Regional Collaborative.