COVID-19: 430,000 people died from AIDS due to lockdown, says NACA
- The National Agency for the Control of AIDS has released its latest data concerning people living with the epidemic
- According to NACA, the six months COVID-19 lockdown triggered the death of 430,000 persons who died of AIDS
- NACA revealed that the deaths are in sub-Saharan Africa and they were mostly due to less anti-retroviral treatments
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The National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA) has revealed that 430,000 persons in sub-Saharan Africa may have died of AIDS due to the six months interruption in treatment caused by COVID-19 lockdown.
Quoting statistics from the United Nations AIDS Control programme (UNAIDS), NACA said the rise in the death toll came against a significant drop in Anti-Retroviral Treatment (ART) within the period of the COVID-19 lockdown.
In a bid to scale up intervention efforts, NACA added that it would require an additional investment of $2.4 billion to be able to reach the United Nations’ epidemic control target in the next three years.
Source: Twitter
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The body, which is the lead agency driving the federal government’s efforts to tackle HIV-AIDS epidemic, said the amount would be needed to identify and treat additional 540,000 persons living with HIV by testing 50 million persons to know their status.
While presenting the 2020 quarterly performance factsheet at a press conference in Abuja, the Director-General of NACA, Dr Gambo Gumel Aliyu, said a total of $6.2 billion was spent to identify and treat 1,080,000 of the estimated persons living with HIV from 2005 to 2018.
Meanwhile, the World Bank has unveiled its plan to assist not less than 100 nations to buy COVID-19 vaccines with about $160 billion till June of 2021.
To kickstart the project, the bank recently approved for disbursement the sum of $12 billion for such countries to develop or buy vaccines.
Legit.ng had earlier reported that leading the global efforts to find the vaccines are the World Health Organization, the GAVI vaccine alliance and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
The organisations have come up with a programme tagged COVAX vaccine initiative which is not only concerned with the production of the vaccines but also the distribution when they (the vaccines) become available.
According to Axios, about 183 countries with a combined 93% of the world's population have directly or indirectly subscribed to the COVAX initiative.
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Source: Legit.ng
