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Today is World Aids Day. It is an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV, show their support for people living with HIV and to commemorate people who have died.
World AIDS Day was the first ever global health day, held for the first time in 1988, and this year’s message is ‘getting to zero by 2030’.
According to the World Health Organisation, the number of grandparents caring for AIDS orphans in developing countries has doubled over the last ten years and up to half of the world’s 15 million AIDS orphans are being cared by a grandparent.
The majority of older caregivers are women who face serious financial, physical and emotional stress due to their belated caregiving responsibilities.
Older people are increasingly being infected by HIV, however available data does not often include how the pandemic is affecting this population group. As a consequence, older people continue to be excluded from HIV prevention and treatment programmes.
UNAIDS estimates that 2.8 million people aged 50 and over were living with HIV in 2006 and the prevalence of HIV in South Africa among people age 50-54 was 10.8%, 4.5% among those aged 55-59, and 3.9% among those aged 60 and over.
At the end of October 2015, the UNAIDS Programme Coordinating Board adopted a new strategy to end the AIDS epidemic as a public health threat by 2030. The UNAIDS 2016–2021 Strategy is one of the first in the United Nations system to be aligned to the Sustainable Development Goals, which set the framework for global development policy over the next 15 years, including ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030. Click here to read more.
On World AIDS Day, new WHO recommendations will launch to work towards ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030. These include the use of innovative HIV testing methods; customising treatment approaches to meet the full diversity of people’s needs; and offering a wider spectrum of prevention options.
To find out more about AIDS and HIV, click here.
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