By Daniela Hirschfeld, Julien Chongwang

By 2020, the aspiration is that the world will have achieved UNAIDS’s so-called 90-90-90 target – 90 percent of people infected by HIV/AIDS should know their status, 90 per cent of these people should be on antiretroviral treatment, and 90 per cent of people on treatment should have undetectable levels of the virus.
“Since the universal access to antiretrovirals, the prevention focus was lost, and the focus is only on care,”
Felipe Varela Ojeda
The problem is that, despite the progress, stigma and ignorance are still hampering efforts to fight the disease in parts of Africa and Latin America, where most of the people living with HIV are located. Many states must still work to reverse the stigmatization of certain segments of the population such as homosexuals and drug users.
In Togo, for example, a survey by the Centre National de Lutte contre le Sida (CNLS) shows that infection rates are almost one in five among gay men, compared with 2.4 per cent nationally.
In recent years, the focus of in managing HIV/AIDs has shifted towards treatment with antiretroviral drugs as awareness levels rose across the world. However, as a result of these stigmatised communities, many observers continue to say that prevention must be placed once again at the heart of the campaign against HIV/AIDS to stop its progress.
Selected countries: % of people living with HIV recieving ART in 2015 (Source: UNAIDS)In Colombia, for example, it is estimated that the use of condoms in the Colombian general population varies between 9 per cent in young people in certain medium-sized cities and 20 or 30 per cent in uninfected men and women, and up to 96 per cent in HIV-positive sex workers.
And in fact on this aspect of awareness, Marcelo Vila, sub-regional consultant on HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis in Argentina says that, “the biggest challenge is diagnosis”.”Many people still do not know that they are infected.”
This article was originally published on SciDev.Net. Read the original article.
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