Right to health the anchor to ending AIDS or Covid-19

WHILE we have made significant progress since the late 1990s in our fight to end AIDS, it remains a major global public health issue. Even today, globally more than 12 million people living with HIV are not on treatment and 1.7 million people became infected with the virus in 2019 because they could not access essential prevention services.

The good news is that India has shown a remarkable decline of 66 percent in new HIV infections over the past decade, which is the highest in the whole of the Asia Pacific region, said Dr. Ishwar Gilada, president of the AIDS Society of India, who also represents the Asia Pacific region in the governing council of the International AIDS Society.