By Professor Michel Kazatchkine, Executive Director, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria
2011 is a year to reflect upon the remarkable progress we have made in the 10 years since Kofi Annan called for a “war chest” to fight AIDS, a call that was endorsed by the General Assembly soon after and led to the creation of the Global Fund the following year. Even in those exciting and hopeful days, none of us imagined that 10 years later nearly seven million people would be receiving antiretroviral treatment in developing countries and that impressive gains would be achieved in reducing HIV incidence in large parts of the world.
This progress is the result of a huge collective effort in four major areas. First, we have mobilized a unique and diverse social movement that is multi-sectoral and has global reach as well as deep community roots. Second, there has been sustained political commitment, notably from the G8 countries but also from many countries that are heavily affected by the disease. Third, this commitment has been accompanied by substantial new resources that have enabled many countries to bring AIDS programmes to scale. And fourth, we have benefited from the remarkable contributions of science and research.
The IAS conferences have helped to catalyze action in each of these areas and they provide a unique opportunity for us to take stock of progress and identify emerging or unmet challenges.
AIDS is an area where science has quite rapidly translated into policy. This is particularly crucial in the case of HIV prevention, where numerous tools exist but can so easily be undermined by a hostile legal and policy environment, as we too often see in the case of harm reduction and interventions for sex workers and men who have sex with men.
The IAS meetings also frequently catalyze important discussions around the “implementability” of new science. In recent years, implementing the WHO recommendation to begin treatment at CD4 counts of 350, making the switch from single-dose to combination therapy for prevention of mother-to-child transmission and scaling up male circumcision have been among the key implementation challenges discussed at the this conference. In light of the remarkable findings of the preventive effect associated with treatment, much of the discussion in Rome will concern strategies to further scale-up treatment in a sustainable way and to optimize its impact.
Thanks to the research presented at IAS conferences over the years and the strong links that the conferences help to forge between scientists, policy makers and implementers, the Rome conference may be the first at which we can actually begin to envisage the end of the AIDS epidemic. That prospect may seem less remote today than treating millions of people in poor countries did 10 years ago.
I look forward to seeing you in Rome.