Putting children at the centre of the end of aids

The Lancet, Global Health Blog

Charles Lyons, President and CEO of the EGPAF

In the 15 years since the Millennium Development Goals were adopted, the number of people accessing antiretroviral therapy (ART) for HIV/AIDS has dramatically increased, from less than 1 million people to 12.9 million in 2013. Despite the global effort to scale up treatment, children have largely been left behind. The consequences of this failure to act are grim: only one quarter of the 3.2 million children living with HIV were able to access treatment in 2013, and today, like every day, more than 500 children will die of AIDS. Quite simply, the global community has failed to adequately address and prioritise paediatric HIV treatment around the world.

This failure undermines efforts to tackle this disease and makes the global goal of ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030 effectively impossible.

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