HIV/AIDS

Following is UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ message on World AIDS Day, observed on 1 December:

Following is the text of UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s video message to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) Structured Funding Dialogue, today:

The global level of undernourishment increased sharply last year, under the shadow of the COVID‑19 pandemic, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization’s annual Statistical Yearbook, released today.  Nearly 10 per cent of the world’s population suffered from hunger in 2020, up from 8.4 per cent in 2019.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) cited a tight window for farmers in hunger-stricken northern Ethiopia to get crops in the ground ahead of upcoming seasonal rains.  It appealed for $30 million in urgent support, noting that farmers have seen seeds and animals looted and credit lines disappear.

The international community must increase efforts to address the inequalities driving the HIV/AIDS epidemic as the global response to that virus has been hindered by COVID-19 and other crises, Member States told the General Assembly today as it concluded its high-level meeting on HIV/AIDS .

Following is the text of UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s video message for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria’s twentieth anniversary campaign today:

People living with and affected by HIV and their communities must be at the centre of the response to the global AIDS epidemic, which has claimed more than 33 million people globally, speakers said today as the General Assembly continued its high-level meeting on ending the scourge by 2030.

Warning that the international community must not let its current battle against COVID-19 cost its war against HIV/AIDS, world leaders detailed national efforts to tackle the threat to public health posed by one virus despite the shocks reverberating from the other, as the General Assembly continued its high‑level meeting on HIV/AIDS today.

Countries must embrace hard lessons learned over four decades of the HIV epidemic — including the need for human rights-based action focused on populations most at risk — as they confront the “colliding pandemics” of COVID-19 and its fallout, which threaten to derail crucial public health gains, ministers stressed during the second day of the high-level General Assembly meeting on HIV/AIDS.

World leaders in the General Assembly today committed to “urgent and transformative action” to end the gender inequalities, restrictive laws and multiple forms of discrimination that perpetuate the global AIDS epidemic, adopting a lengthy Political Declaration that spells out measures to stop the disease in its tracks by 2030.