Image: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton speaking at the NIH event (Photo courtesy of NIH).

The United States has declared a policy goal to have an "AIDS-free generation" in the near future, focusing on a combination of three interventions proven to slow the spread of the disease.

The eradication of AIDS was presented as a policy goal of the Obama administration by US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during a National Institutes of Health (NIH; Bethesda, MD, USA) event held on November 8, 2011, to commemorate 30 years of the fight against AIDS. The Secretary of State called for a renewed push against AIDS by the United States and other countries, using scientific advances to stem the pandemic. In addition to relying on science, Clinton urged more emphasis of country ownerships of AIDS prevention programs and called on other donor nations to do their part, by supporting and strengthening the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (The Global Fund, Geneva, Switzerland).

In her speech, Secretary Clinton outlined the three main areas of focus for the government's AIDS-free generation plan: Prevention of mother-to-child transmissions--which are responsible for one in seven new infections worldwide--which is already a global goal of the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to eliminate new infections in babies by 2015. Increase rates of voluntary male circumcision, a procedure that has been shown to reduce the risk of female-to-male transmission by more than 60%. Use treatment to prevent new infections, as recent studies show that treating HIV-positive patients with antiretroviral drugs helps reduce transmission of the virus to a noninfected partner by 96%.

“By an AIDS-free generation, I mean one where, first, virtually no children are born with the virus; second, as these children become teenagers and adults, they are at far lower risk of becoming infected than they would be today thanks to a wide range of prevention tools; and third, if they do acquire HIV, they have access to treatment that helps prevent them from developing AIDS and passing the virus on to others,” declared Secretary Clinton.

Secretary Clinton added that the US government would commit an additional USD 60 million beyond the USD 50 million it has already spent to explore which prevention tactics work best in sub-Saharan Africa, where AIDS is the leading cause of death. When President George W. Bush signed the PEPFAR legislation in 2003, only 50,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa were receiving antiretroviral drugs. Today, more than five million sub-Saharan Africans receive the drugs, along with another one million people in other regions of the world. Most of those drugs are paid for by the US, either through PEPFAR or through the Global Fund.

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