08 Juillet 2014
|WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION AT THE INTERNATIONAL AIDS CONFERENCE (20-25 JULY 2014)
Sex workers, men who have sex with men, transgender people, people who inject drugs, and prisoners continue to be disproportionately affected by HIV. Despite major global progress on HIV, with more people taking antiretroviral treatment and fewer people becoming newly infected, people whose lifestyles and behaviours are criminalized or stigmatized still face major barriers to accessing services to prevent, diagnose and treat HIV. Failure to provide services to these “key populations” not only threatens the health and wellbeing of individual people and their families, it jeopardises further progress against the global epidemic.
At the International AIDS Conference 2014 in Melbourne, the World Health Organisation (WHO) will call on governments to ‘reboot’ and strengthen HIV programmes so that all key populations benefit from advances in HIV treatment and programme scale-up, and will launch new recommendations to help countries improve services for them.
In addition, WHO will be urging further full scale action on the many challenges that must be faced as the global HIV response moves beyond 2015 and seeks to end the AIDS epidemic.