More action needed for youth HIV/AIDS prevention

Dr Peter Piot, Executive Director of UNAIDS, has called on governments to expand their efforts to provide HIV prevention and care for young people. "The tools we need to protect the world’s children are well-known, but too few of these tools are being applied to mobilise young people into action," he said in a speech prepared for delivery at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children on Friday. According to Piot, immediate action on several fronts could quickly make an impact in preventing HIV among children and young people. Prevention of mother-to-child transmission programmes, which currently reached less than 5 percent of women in sub-Saharan Africa, needed to be scaled up worldwide. Children orphaned by AIDS needed the help of their governments and communities to stay in school, feed themselves adequately, and get involved in income-generating activities. And youth HIV prevention programmes should be greatly expanded, overcome taboos and stigma, and give young people the skills for responsible and safe sexual behaviour and access to the means to protect themselves, he added. Piot also called on nations to use the Convention of the Rights of the Child, an international treaty to protect and ensure children’s rights, as a tool to combat HIV/AIDS. He challenged the General Assembly to live up to the commitments made at the Millennium Summit in 2000, the UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS in 2001, and this week’s Special Session on Children. At these meetings, the world’s leaders have agreed on targets for action against HIV/AIDS, including a pledge to reduce youth HIV prevalence in the hardest-hit countries by 25 percent by 2010. "These targets are empty gestures unless we use them as an instrument of accountability," he added.