The 23rd Australasian HIV/AIDS Conference held in Canberra brought forth a challenge to reduce HIV transmissions amongst men who have sex with men by 80 per cent by 2015.
In response to the recent UN Declaration on HIV, Bill Whittaker from the National Association of People Living with HIV (NAPWA) called on the government to bring change to our National HIV Strategies to be on par with the new guidelines. The United Nations set the guidelines at the High Level Meeting held in New York earlier this year. The conference was held in Canberra last week, right before the 2011 Australasian Sexual Health Conference.
In June, the UN set bold targets for the global community to reach by 2015. The targets called for a ‘scale-up’ in treatment to those with HIV to 15 million people to reduce the number of transmissions by intercourse and drug use by 50 per cent and eliminate mother to child transmissions completely.
However, even with the bar set rather high by the UN, Whittaker still believes we can achieve much more than this within Australia.
‘We have been sitting on roughly 1000 new HIV transmissions per year in Australia for many years now,’ Whittaker said.
These cases continue to be mainly amongst men who have sex with men.
Chairman of the Ministerial Advisory Council government body, Professor Michael Kidd, who was responsible for implementing the sixth HIV National Strategy, agreed that our national targets need serious considerations.
Whittaker said by implementing a combination of prevention techniques like education campaigns and new HIV testing strategies, it was achievable for us to reduce these numbers by 80 per cent by 2015.
NAPWA emphasises the importance of people with HIV understanding the benefits of treatment- it reduces transitions from people who have HIV by up to 96 per cent.
Whittaker proposed to take the number of people with HIV on antiretroviral therapy in Australia from 70 per cent to 90 per cent by 2013.
Vanessa Manivannen
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