This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post here.
Reposted with permission. By Ward Cates, Distinguished Scientist
& President Emeritus, FHI 360 Last year, we celebrated 30 years
of progress in the fight against AIDS. This year, let’s
celebrate World AIDS Day by looking forward. We’ve challenged
ourselves by setting an ambitious goal of an AIDS-free
generation. Let’s examine where we are on our way to that goal.
A recent model known as the HIV treatment cascade helps identify
the key opportunities to improve services to stop the spread of
HIV (see figure). Getting into the treatment cascade begins with
HIV testing, because knowing whether one is infected or not
determines the next course of action. We have evidence that
helping people to complete each step in this cascade is crucial
both to assuring the individual’s health and to achieving the
public health goal of an AIDS-free generation. We can use the
cascade model to help gain accurate assessments of the “leakage
points” in the HIV care and treat