View Cart

General > Health & Medicines

Health & Medicines

Ghana Health Issues - World TB Day

Source: USAID, GENEVA, 24 March 2010 – In this era of increasing access to antiretroviral therapy, it is unacceptable that tuberculosis remains among the commonest causes of illness and death in people living with HIV.
Even though TB is preventable and curable it continues to claim the lives of half a million people living with HIV each year. The HIV community cannot stand by and let this happen. Left unchecked TB and drug resistant TB - which knows no borders - could spread and become an even more severe global health threat.
The world has already committed to reducing new TB cases and deaths under Millennium Development Goal 6. However, I call on the HIV community to go one step further: We must commit to halving TB deaths in people living with HIV by 2015.
UNAIDS is firmly committed to achieving this goal through the Joint Outcome Framework. Let us join hands with the TB community to raise awareness of TB among people living with HIV, strengthen joint community responses to HIV and TB and increase access to the most effective and integrated TB prevention, diagnostic and treatment services for people living with HIV.
We can do much more to stop TB.
We can stop people living with HIV from dying of TB.
On this World TB Day I call on all our partners to make a pledge – halve TB deaths in people living with HIV by 2015 and bring hope to millions of people.

Funding for HIV prevention has become the smallest percentage of the HIV budgets of many countries. For example in Swaziland, just 17% of the country’s total budget for AIDS was spent on prevention despite a national HIV prevalence rate of 26%. In Ghana, the prevention budget was cut in 2007 by 43% from 2005 levels.

Building capacity: new social networking site for global AIDS community
Building on the need to maximize results and to better connect the 33.4 million people living with HIV and the millions of people who are part of the AIDS response, UNAIDS has launched AIDSspace.org. This social networking site is open to the community and is free.

AIDSspace.org aims to expand informal and established networks to include more people interested in HIV to maximize resources for a stronger AIDS response. The premise behind AIDSspace is simple: if hundreds of millions of people can connect on some of the most popular social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube) to connect, exchange ideas, post and share HIV-related content, they can do the same for HIV related content - including key policies, case studies, multimedia materials, conference posters, reports and other essential resources. Users can also find and post jobs and reviews on service providers on AIDSspace.org.