4th August, 2017
The National Aids Council Operations says one million Zimbabweans are now on the Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART) as the country remains on course to meet UN targets on HIV and AIDS.
Council director, Raymond Yekeye, said that at least 300,000 people are yet to commence the ARVs, while the rate of new infections remained steady at around 40,000 a year.
“Our new infections (Incidents) have dropped by 0.48 per cent from 0.98 per cent in 2011.
“What we have planned as a country is to reduce our new infections by half in 2018 and we have already done that in less than the period we were looking at.
“We have a fairly large treatment programme and our coverage is around 76 per cent,” Yekeye was quoted as saying by Friday’s Herald Newspaper.
Some of the country’s 10 provinces have surpassed some of the UN targets commonly referred to as 90-90-90.
The global targets was aimed at increasing the numbers of HIV positive people, who know their status by 90 per cent, those on treatment by 90 percent and have the viral load of 90 per cent of those on treatment reduced to undetectable levels.
Of the estimated 1.2 million Zimbabweans living with HIV, 74.2 per cent know their status and 86.8 per cent of these are on antiretroviral treatment.
Yekeye said the country faced problems dealing with drug resistance, new strains of HIV and non-communicable diseases such as cancer.
“It seems cancer is more acceptable as a cause of death than HIV, but we have seen that most people dying of cancers are on ART,” he said.