HIV epidemics are becoming more concentrated in marginalised groups which could hamper efforts to combat Aids.
HIV epidemics are becoming more concentrated in marginalised groups such as sex workers, drug users and gay men, and could defy global attempts to combat Aids if attitudes do not change, a UN expert said.
Michel Kazatchkine, UN Special Envoy for HIV/Aids in Eastern Europe, says he would like to be able to celebrate without reservation global progress made in the past decade, but stubborn infection rates and alarming growth of outbreaks in hard-to-reach populations make that difficult.
The risk, he says, is that as the world turns the tide of the global Aids pandemic, the virus will return to being a disease that plagues only certain groups and the political will to overcome it may fade.
“If we do not address the roots of the problem, if we do not address stigma, discrimination and inappropriate legislation, if we don’t look at these people from a public health perspective, rather than from a delinquent, criminal perspective as we do now, then the trend will only go on,” he said.
“Then the Aids epidemic will become more and more a sum of these concentrated epidemics.”
Health24
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