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Long-awaited HIV/AIDS guidelines to be launched

With 14.4 percent of Malawi's 11 million people living with HIV/AIDS, the country has announced that its first-ever national policy on the disease would be launched on Tuesday. Biswick Mwale, head of Malawi's national AIDS commission, said the policy would try to provide a legal and administrative framework to help tackle the pandemic. He was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying: "The estimated HIV prevalence among adults of 15 to 49 years in Malawi in 2003 was 14.4 percent, which [is] 0.6 percentage points lower than the 2001 rate of 15 percent." However, Mwale warned that statistically this did not represent a decrease in prevalence, but rather indicated that the epidemic was stabilising.

This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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