About 38 million individuals worldwide are at present contaminated with HIV.
LONDON:
Greater than a 3rd of the world’s international locations say they’re susceptible to working out of life-saving AIDS medicine due to disruptions to produce strains and different issues brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Well being Group stated on Monday.
Twenty-four out of these 73 nations have already reported critically low provides of the very important antiretroviral medicine, the company stated.
“The findings of this survey are deeply regarding,” the WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated in a press release at first of the Worldwide AIDS convention.
“We can’t let the COVID-19 pandemic undo the hard-won positive factors within the world response to this illness.”
The WHO stated about eight.three million HIV-positive individuals are reliant on the antiretroviral medicine within the 24 worst-hit states – a few third of all individuals taking HIV remedy globally.
It didn’t identify the affected international locations in its survey.
Whereas there isn’t a treatment for the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, medicine often called antiretrovirals (ARVs) can management the virus and stop HIV-positive individuals from transmitting it by way of intercourse to others.
About 38 million individuals worldwide are at present contaminated with HIV.
The survey discovered that through the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, a failure of suppliers to ship ARVs on time, mixed with drastically diminished land and air transport and restricted entry to well being providers, have brought on main disruptions to drug provides.
The WHO has issued steerage on sustaining entry to important well being providers, similar to HIV remedy and testing clinics, through the pandemic. It says well being authorities ought to take into account “multi-month dishing out” for AIDS medicine – a coverage whereby medicines are prescribed for as much as six months.
(Apart from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
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