Editorial: countdown to zero: only possible with 100% support for children and families

Abstract

No child should be born with HIV; no child should be an orphan because of HIV; no child should die due to lack of access to treatment, urged Ebube Sylvia Taylor, an 11-year-old born free of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), to world leaders gathered in New York to share progress made toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. So begins the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic 2010. The Foreword concludes with the following encouragement from the UNAIDS executive director that To fulfill Ebube's hope, we must break the trajectory of the AIDS epidemic by redoubling our efforts to ensure countries meet their goals toward universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support. We must leverage the growing integration of AIDS with maternal and child health and all of our Millennium Development Goals. HIV infection in new-borns is essentially preventable. Effective interventions have been available since 1994, with increasing refinement since then. The challenge now is one of delivery to get prevention, treatment, care, and support to the right people at the right time and in the right place. To achieve this requires that we address also a conceptual challenge the individualistic approaches we have used to date to address HIV need to be expanded to encompass also a systems approach, including the family and community, in which pregnant women and children are located.