The Sunday News
Tinomuda Chakanyuka, Sunday News Reporter
THE country has recorded a remarkable decrease in the number of people dying from HIV and Aids-related illnesses in the last 10 years, statistics from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAIDS) show.
This comes at a time when a new report by Unaids also shows that global figures have also gone down significantly over the past decade. According to data from Unaids, an estimated 31 000 people died of HIV-related illnesses in 2015, down from about 120 000 recorded in 2005 in Zimbabwe.The figures represent an estimated 74 percent decline in deaths related to Aids in the past decade. The figures remain unchanged from 2014 which also recorded 31 000 Aids-related deaths. The data also shows that the number of deaths among children aged between zero and 14 has also gone down from about 30 000 in 2005 to about 4 400 in 2015. At the peak of the epidemic the country was recording close to 3 000 deaths a week, which translates to about 159 000 deaths annually.
Unaids country director Mr Michael Bartos attributed the decrease to a number of factors among them the successful rollout of the anti-retroviral programme. Prior to the latest World Health Organisation, guidelines on ART, that require treatment for people living with HIV to commence upon diagnosis, Zimbabwe had managed to put 80 percent of people living with HIV on treatment.
Mr Bartos said the figures showed that the country was on track to achieving the 2030 target of ending Aids. He, however, noted that more still needed to be done to achieve the goals.
“The reduced deaths are largely attributed to the scaling up of ART and TB programme. The number of people dying from HIV and Aids-related illnesses has been declining steadily over the past couple of years and that can be attributed to a number of factors.
“Some of the factors include behaviour change, increase in condom use and of course the scaling up of treatment in the mid-2000s which kept a lot of people alive,” he said.
Added Mr Bartos, “All those factors are associated with the decline of Aids-related deaths and a notable drop in HIV incidence.”
He said the country needed to scale up provision of treatment to cover every person living with HIV.
“There has been steady progress on the treatment side and there is need to maintain that. Actually we should start looking at expanding the treatment programme to achieve the 90-90-90 target.”
The 90-90-90 is a concept introduced by the United Nation’s programme on HIV/Aids in 2013. The idea behind the concept is that by 2020, 90 percent of people who living with HIV will know their status, 90 percent of people who are diagnosed will be on antiretroviral treatment and 90 percent of those who receive antiretrovirals will be virally suppressed.
Mr Bartos also emphasised on the need to “close the tape” on the new infections if the country was to succeed in meeting the targets.
According the UN GAP Report of 2014, Zimbabwe accounted for about three percent of all new HIV infections globally in 2013.
An estimated 36,7 million are living with HIV globally and only 18,2 million are on treatment.
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