By Metohuey Michael Adoglo
In a Statement released by WHO Africa office; “Africa has made significant progress against HIV over the past decade, reducing new infections by 43 percent and nearly halving AIDS-related deaths,”.
But it warned that Africa was not likely to meet a target to end AIDS as a public health threat by the turn of the decade as Covid has undermined the fight in many countries.
WHO Africa chief Matshidiso Moeti added that Covid-19 has made the fight against HIV all the more challenging, but one virus must not win out over another, insisting the continent must tackle Covid-19 and HIV in parallel.
UNAIDS last week warned that HIV infection rates were not decreasing fast enough to reach the goal of eradicating AIDS by 2030.
According to data released at the annual International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections (ICASA) currently being held in South Africa’s port city of Durban, only nine African countries are on track to meet the target in the next four years.
The countries are Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Cape Verde, Botswana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
South Africa remains the country with the world’s highest HIV prevalence rate at 20.4 percent