Africa’s leadership on AIDS has sharply increased life expectancy and steadily reduced new HIV infections. Hopes are high, but these gains are at grave risk. Continued dependency on external AIDS funding and imported medicines and diagnostics threatens to put the future of AIDS beyond Africa’s control.

This Global Plan provides the foundation for country-led movement towards the elimination of new HIV infections among children and keeping their mothers alive. The Global Plan was developed through a consultative process by a high level Global Task Team convened by UNAIDS and co-chaired by UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibé and United States Global AIDS Coordinator Ambassador Eric Goosby. It brought together 25 countries and 30 civil society, private sector, networks of people living with HIV and international organizations to chart a roadmap to achieving this goal by 2015.

Fast-tracking the AIDS response and setting ambitious targets are critical to ending the AIDS epidemic. This requires transforming the vision of zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths into concrete milestones and endpoints.

New UNAIDS report shows that young people are leading the prevention revolution, with 15 of the most severely affected countries reporting a 25% drop in HIV prevalence among this key population. New global opinion poll shows that AIDS continues to be of major importance for the public around the world.

More than half of all sexually transmitted infections, other than HIV, (more than 180 million out of a global annual total of 340 million) occur among young people aged 15 to 24. Yet most young people still have no access to sexual and reproductive health programmes that provide the information, skills, services, commodities, and social support they need to prevent HIV. In fact, many laws and policies go as far as to exclude young people from accessing sexual health and HIV-related services, such as HIV testing and counselling, the provision of condoms, and age-appropriate sexuality and HIV prevention education.

The AIDS virus has been found in prisons in most countries of the world. This should be a source of the utmost concern -- not only for prisoners and prison staff, but for society in general.

In many prisons around the world there is a much higher prevalence of HIV than there is in society outside. There is usually also a much higher rate of certain other diseases, such as hepatitis B and C, syphilis and tuberculosis. Experience has shown that there is a lot that can be done to check the spread of HIV, but for that to occur, those responsible for the prison system must first recognize certain risk factors and forms of behaviour in prisons.

This paper discusses the precarious existence of refugees and why HIV/AIDS is such a critical factor to them (a lack of a safe blood supply, the emergence of prostitution in exchange for food and other essentials, and an insufficient supply of condoms and health care). The report also documents various facts and figures, and offers suggestions as to how issues regarding refugees and AIDS can be handled.