UNAIDS chief calls for more efforts against AIDS

Marking the World AIDS Day, Michel Sidibe, Executive Director of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, or UNAIDS, on Saturday called for more to be done in combating AIDS. Sidibe said in a statement that the pace of progress is quickening as far fewer people are dying from AIDS and 25 countries have reduced new infections by more than 50 percent. "We have moved from despair to hope... It is unprecedented -- what used to take a decade is now being achieved in just 24 months," he said. "We only have a thousand days left before the deadline of the 2015 global AIDS targets. Let us renew our commitment to getting to zero--zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths," he said. An estimated 2.5 million people were newly-infected with HIV in 2011, some 100,000 fewer than in 2010 and 700,000 fewer than in 2001, according to the UNAIDS' annual World AIDS Day Report released on Nov. 20. Half of all reductions in new HIV infections in the last two years have been among newborn children, which showed that elimination of new infections in children is possible, said the report.