Addis Ababa, 28 August 2006-- The “alarming trend in HIV incidence” in the African Region calls for urgent measures to further control the progress of the epidemic”, says WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Luis Sambo, in a report Tuesday to the fifty-sixth session of the WHO Regional Committee for Africa.

WHO and UNAIDS estimate that nearly two-thirds of the world’s HIV-positive population live in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2005 alone, out of 4.9 million new infections worldwide, 3.2 million occurred in the African region, the majority of those affected aged between 15 and 49. During the same period, 2.4 million adults and children died and more than 12 million children were orphaned due to AIDS.

Dr Sambo cautions that should this trend continue, most countries in the Region are unlikely to achieve one of the targets of the seventh Millennium Development Goal -- which is to have halted and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS by 2015.

The Regional Director states that although countries in the region had made encouraging progress in implementing various elements of prevention and treatment interventions to control and mitigate the impact of the epidemic, efforts of Member States were being hampered by several challenges.

These include weak health systems and limited coverage of services in order to have the required impact, weak linkages between prevention and treatment interventions and inadequate sustainable financial resources.

The Regional Director’s report outlines steps Member States should take to renew and accelerate HIV prevention efforts.

These include:

• The decentralization of strategic approaches entailing the creation of an enabling policy environment;
• Expansion and intensification of effective HIV prevention interventions;
• Linking HIV/AIDS prevention treatment, care and support in an “essential package”;
• Increasing access by scaling up implementation;
• Strengthening health systems to increase demand for services and
• Increasing and sustainable financial resources.

According to Dr Sambo, these approaches would involve the development of specific policies and legislation that promote human rights; the use of all channels of communication to ensure awareness of existing policies and legislation; behaviour change communication; routine HIV testing at tuberculosis clinics and strengthening the management of sexually-transmitted diseases; promotion of the use of condoms; strengthening and decentralizing laboratory services, and concerted efforts to achieve the Abuja Declaration target of countries allocating 15% of their budgets to the health sector, among others.

In implementing the strategy to renew and accelerate HIV prevention in the region, Dr Sambo pledged that WHO, in collaboration with other development partners, will continue to provide countries with technical leadership and normative guidance for the development of action plans, programme implementation, monitoring and evaluation, resource mobilization and strengthening government capacity to coordinate the activities within the Framework of the “Three ones” Principles.

For further information contact:

Technical Contact

Dr Dr Rui Gama Vaz 
Email: vazr [at] afro.who.int

Media contact: 

Samuel T. Ajibola
Tel: + 47 241 39378
In Addis Ababa : 0911 53 23 32
Email: ajibolas [at] afro.who.int