On this World AIDS Day, the US gov­ern­ment held a press con­fer­ence that made sev­eral announce­ments. First of all, the World AIDS Con­fer­ence will come to Wash­ing­ton in 2012, the first time it has been held in the US since 1990. Reuters also reports that the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion will lift the ban on peo­ple enter­ing the US that are HIV positive.

Finally, changes will be announced to PEPFAR, the ini­tia­tive to pro­vide emer­gency vac­cines to those with AIDS in the under-developed world. Pres­i­dent George H W Bush began the pro­gram, now the Obama admin­is­tra­tion would like to make some changes to PEPFAR.

Those changes are the focus of our snip­pet for this post, Reuters reporter Andrew Quinn found out what the changes may entail.

Eric Goosby, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s global AIDS coor­di­na­tor, said he would announce later this week a five-year strat­egy for PEPFAR that would see the empha­sis shift from emer­gency inter­ven­tions such as pro­vid­ing drugs to longer-term efforts to improve basic health­care services.

Goosby said his review would include details of how PEPFAR will work with inter­na­tional part­ners and recip­i­ent gov­ern­ments to improve health­care deliv­ery and address stigma and dis­crim­i­na­tion in a “global response to a global responsibility.”

The AIDS virus infects 33 mil­lion peo­ple glob­ally and about a mil­lion in the United States, but more peo­ple are liv­ing longer thanks to HIV drugs, accord­ing to a recent U.N. report.

But more than half the peo­ple who need life­sav­ing drugs are not get­ting them, the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion and Joint U.N. Pro­gram on HIV/AIDS say.

Cock­tails of drugs can con­trol HIV but there is no cure and no vaccine.

PEPFAR, the President’s Emer­gency Plan for AIDS Relief, has been cred­ited with help­ing to cut AIDS deaths by 10 per­cent in tar­geted African nations and sav­ing more than a mil­lion lives, in large part by sup­ply­ing HIV drugs.

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