The third meeting of the Technical Committee for the Arab AIDS Strategy was held in Riyadh yesterday under the umbrella of the Arab League and with the participation of government representatives and government experts from a number of Arab countries, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV / AIDS (UNAIDS) and the WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean.
The meeting aims to discuss the challenges, opportunities and obstacles currently facing the region and how to find joint and cooperative solutions that ensure the region will achieve the vision of the Arab strategy for combating AIDS 2014-2020 in order to accelerate the response and eradicate AIDS in Arab countries.
The meeting reviewed the progress made in the Arab strategy for combating AIDS, in addition to developing recommendations to scale up implementation of the strategy at national and regional levels and setting up approaches for challenges associated with application of interventions to prevent spread of AIDS, as well as exchanging experiences, knowledge and lessons learned among Arab countries on combatting AIDS, developing a vision to strengthen epidemiological and statistical mechanisms that are applicable in the Arab countries to have a potential assessment for people living with HIV and means of measuring coefficient of variation in the Arab countries.
It is noteworthy that the HIV infection is one of the health challenges in the Arab region, as it is estimated that the number of new incidences and AIDS-related deaths have increased significantly in the last decade, and studies suggest that there are emerging epidemics among the most vulnerable populations in many countries and throughout the region. Limited strategic information on the HIV situation, high level of stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV and limited financial and technical resources are key factors hindering an effective HIV response. In this context, it is essential to increase the effectiveness of epidemic surveillance to generate more strategic information and to ensure prevention activities are strengthened and developing strong and multi-sectoral response.
Also, it is be noted that the vision and objectives of the Arab strategy for combating AIDS is to achieve an AIDS-free generation in the Arab world with zero new infections, zero AIDS-related deaths and zero stigma and discrimination.
The strategic objectives of the meeting include reducing the HIV incidence rate through sexual transmission by 50% by 2020, reducing the HIV incidence rate among those who inject drugs by 50% by 2020, eliminating new infections among children and substantially reducing AIDS-related maternal deaths, ensuring access to antiretroviral therapy in the region by 2020, reducing the mortality rate among people living with HIV from tuberculosis (TB) by 50% by 2020, closing the gap of AIDS special resources and increasing national investment in AIDS by 100% by 2020 in all Arab countries.