When it started in the early 1980s, everyone was scared. No one knew how to help the people who were filling U.S. hospitals and then swiftly dying, or what to do for others suffering the same fate around the world. It was 1984 when one U.S. health official expressed hope for a vaccine within two years.
Now, over three decades and 39 million deaths later, we finally know how to treat, prevent and control HIV, although a vaccine remains elusive. But knowing is different from doing. The real challenge is scaling up what we’ve learned to stop new infections for good.
UNAIDS recently announced its new fast-track strategy to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030. “If the world does not rapidly scale up in the next five years, the epidemic is likely to spring back with a higher rate of new HIV infections than today,” officials from the U.N. agency said. That’s partly because half of the 35 million people who live with HIV today don’t know they’re HIV-positive, so they don’t know they’re in danger of passing the virus on to others.
About the author
Margarite Nathe
Margarite Nathe is senior editor and writer at IntraHealth International. She edits the VITAL blog and focuses on issues related to health workers around the world. Before joining IntraHealth, Nathe worked in research communications at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
