Blog series examines challenges, solutions in global AIDS response

The Skoll World Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's "Impatient Optimists" blog have co-produced a blog series highlighting key challenges in the global response moving forward and examining how the international community can overcome these challenges. The following summarizes three posts included in the series.

• Mitch Besser, medical director and founder of mothers2mothers: Besser highlights challenges in preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV. "While some countries, like South Africa, Kenya, Zambia, and Namibia have seen greater than 40 percent reductions in new pediatric HIV infections in the last two years, in Nigeria, Mozambique, and Angola there has been little improvement," he writes. He highlights the challenge of health worker shortages in Africa, which "bears 25 percent of the world's disease burden, yet has only three percent of the world's doctors and nurses" (12/4).
• Mary Beth Hastings, vice president at the Center for Health and Gender Equity: Hastings examines gender inequality and HIV, writing, "Women account for slightly more than half of all people living with HIV, and the majority contract it through sex with long-term partners." She states that "by fighting HIV through advancement of gender equality, we reap all kinds of additional benefits" (12/5).
• Ashley Hickey, chief of staff and policy director at (RED): "The world is at a critical point in the fight against AIDS," Hickey writes, adding, "After more than 30 years and 30 million lives lost to a preventable and treatable disease, scientific advancements have given us the ability to bring about the beginning of the end of AIDS" (12/4).