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AIDS Meeting in Uganda Calls for Boosting Health Care Infrastructures
The Conference on AIDS Care in Africa ended in Kampala on Saturday with a declaration calling for strengthening health care infrastructures, increasing the numbers of trained health care personnel and researchers.
The declaration says that essential elements of HIV care also call for providing preventive and therapeutic interventions for complications HIV, expanding access to antiretroviral agents, and ensuring other supportive services.
It says that biomedical, behavioral and operational research can provide the information needed to expand and enhance treatment options for persons living with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.
"Research must go hand in hand with political commitment and leadership, community education and activism, enhanced medical and research infrastructures, and culturally competent care provision in order to achieve a comprehensive AIDS response," it says.
Sub-Saharan Africa has been hardest hit by HIV/AIDS. Accounting for 10 percent of the world's population, this region has 70 percent of the world's 36.1 million HIV-infected people.
"Treatment of the 25 million Africans living with HIV/AIDS will benefit both individuals and communities, saving lives, reducing suffering, combating stigma, encouraging HIV testing and increasing the effectiveness of prevention," says the declaration.
The three-day conference, which was jointly organized by the Joint Clinical Research Center in Uganda and U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, were attended by over 300 distinguished scientists and researchers in the world.
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