Reaching 2030 and Beyond: Four Actions to Sustain the HIV Response for Future Generations
December 3rd, 2024 | viewpoint
A health worker conducts stock taking for antiretroviral drugs in Dokolo Health Center IV in Uganda. The USAID RHITES-N, Lango project supported districts and health facilities to ensure the availability and accessibility to essential medicines and health supplies to improve health services. Photo by Malaika Media for JSI
By Henry Nagai, Olawale Durosinmi-Etti, and Pamela Donggo
While the UN goal is to end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030, depending on what we do in the next five years, 20–40 million people are still projected to be living with HIV by that time. To create a sustainable HIV response, we must consider how our actions now will lay the groundwork for a long-term future in which AIDS is no longer a global health and economic threat.
UNAIDS is charting the global roadmap to sustainability, and while each national response will require contextually appropriate solutions, they will have some common elements. Across geographies, here are four actions the global HIV community can take today to ensure that people living with and at risk for HIV can thrive into the future:
Accelerate Prevention
There will still be millions of people living with HIV in and after 2030. We don’t yet have a viable and effective cure or vaccine, and when we do, it will take considerable time and resources to test, approve, and make it accessible to all who need it. Until that time, we need to sustain lifelong treatment and long-term prevention.
However, there is an intermediate goal that we can aim for now: Keep the HIV epidemic as small as possible. That means expanding prevention access and choice to all who need it, especially those most at risk of acquiring HIV. It also means keeping people on treatment so they are healthy and un-transmissable. Our efforts today will determine the size of the epidemic tomorrow.
