[ad_1]
Former US President Bill Clinton on Friday pleaded for the world not to give up in the fight against the AIDS-causing HIV virus, which still kills nearly a million people each year.
" We can not give up. " "I beg you, (…) it's something we can not let down," Bill Clinton said on the final day of the 22nd International AIDS Conference, which brought together some 15,000 researchers in Amsterdam. , activists and people infected with HIV
"By a combination of complacency in some places, and open hostility to multinational cooperation efforts in others, there is a serious risk that many people say: ' Let's stop doing that, "said Bill Clinton, a long-time campaigner against AIDS.
In 2017, the infection killed 940,000 people and among the 36.9 million people living with the virus , an estimated 15.2 million did not have access to adequate treatment
1.8 million newly infected in 2017. "About 35 people will die while I'm here talking," said Clinton, noting that according to the UN, 1.8 million people were newly infected in 2017 with HIV.
After more than Three decades of research, the virus that attacks the immune system and causes AIDS remains incurable and vaccine-free. It has contaminated some 80 million people since the beginning of the epidemic in the early 1980s.
Clinton confident about a future vaccine. A decrease in intensity in the fight against the disease would have "devastating" consequences and would support "the chances of a return to epidemic proportions with vertiginous negative consequences", insisted the former American president. The return of an epidemic could "derail health conditions and ruin the economic and social goals of many countries, leaving behind a devastated landscape," he said.
He is "almost "That an HIV vaccine and a cure for AIDS are at hand," but we are not there yet, we must hold on, "concluded Bill Clinton.
Source link
