Global Pulse Blog

As part of World AIDS Day efforts to educate the public about the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Global Fund Ambassador for the protection of mothers and children against AIDS and first lady of France, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy released a series of interviews “talking about and letting the world know that a woman who is expecting a child can make sure that this child can have a healthy life,” Ms Bruni-Sarkozy told the BBC. She recalled her experience meeting mothers in Burkina Faso and cited this experience as showing her that progress can and must occur in the fight against mother-to-child transmission of HIV. She renewed a call to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV by 2015 through a focus on educating women and increasing their access to means to fight and prevent the disease. This has been a focus area of the Global Fund, UNAIDS, UNICEF, WHO and UNFPA.

This is an important effort given the impact of mother-to-child transmission of the virus.

• Currently, over 45% of HIV-infected pregnant women receive ARV prophylaxis (up from 10% in 2004)
• Only 15% of children born to mothers infected with HIV in reporting low- and middle-income countries were tested for the virus within the first two months of life
• Only 38% of the over 730,000 children in low- and middle-income countries in need of ARV treatment in 2008 received these medications

For more on these efforts, see press coverage of the Global Fund’s World AIDS Day activities.