International Day for the Fight against AIDS
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One year again, we get closer to December 1st, World AIDS Day, and we are still far from halt and begin to reverse the spread of VIH/AIDS by 2015. AIDS has become one of the more destructive epidemics of history, with 40.3 million people living with it in the world, the majority in south countries, more than 3 millions people dead because of diseases linked to AIDS and 5 millions of new infections in 2005.
In the last years, even if the access to antiretroviral has improved in some developing countries, there are still more than 6 million people who need urgent treatment, but they cannot get it because of the high prices that it supposes. Therefore, it is necessary and urgent to work together in a coordinated way in order to reach universal access to prevention, treatment and attention to infected persons, applying wide criteria of justice and social equality and giving priority to the right to health in front of other interests.
Restraining the AIDS epidemic is only one of the goals presented by the public awareness campaign “Health in the Millennium: a missing signature” carried out by Farmacéuticos Mundi and Medicus Mundi Catalunya, with the support of the Catalan Agency of Cooperation for Development. This campaign wants to actively involve Catalan society in the consecution of the Millennium Development Goals related to health.
In 2000, in the frame of the United Nations Summit, 191 countries acquired the compromise to put together the necessary efforts in order to reach the Millennium Development Goals. Five years later, we have not gone far enough.
• Every year, more than 11 million children under five years old die because of foreseeable diseases. More than half of these deaths are linked to malnutrition.
• Every year, half a million women die during pregnancy and childbirth
• 2.000 million people go on living without benefiting from any access to essential drugs.
Throughout 2006, the campaign “Health in the Millennium: a missing signature” will undertake several activities in order to approach the Millennium Development Goals in a rigorous and didactic way for the Catalan citizenship. They will both demand that the administrations fulfil their compromises and provide the necessary means to cooperate more and better.
More information:
MªElena Garcia
Coordinator of the Campaign
tel. +34 679 46 48 12
info@lasalutenelmillenni.org
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