‘Karachi willing to join Paris Declaration on Fast-Track Cities Initiative to end AIDS epidemic’

Karachi Administrator Barrister Murtaza Wahab has said the Karachi Metropolitan Karachi (KMC) is willing to sign the Paris Declaration on Fast-Track Cities Ending the AIDS Epidemic and become part of the Fast-Track Cities Initiative, which has been joined by over 350 cities across the globe.

Talking to Country Director UNAIDS for Pakistan and Afghanistan Yuki Takemoto and Director General Health Sindh Dr Jumman Bahoto at his office on Tuesday, he said it was alarming to note that Pakistan was one of the few countries of the world where new HIV infections were on the rise. He called for collaborative efforts to control the dreaded disease.

He maintained that preventive measures could help in curbing the new cases of HIV in Karachi while those who were already infected needed better treatment facilities and counselling services to live a normal life.

“We can make amendments to the laws and even new laws can be passed to control the spread of HIV in Sindh, especially Karachi where most of the people with HIV are living,” he added.

Takemoto said the Fast-Track Cities Initiative was started as a global partnership between the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, the City of Paris, and cities across the world.

“Since its launch on World AIDS Day 2014 in Paris, more than 350 cities from every region of the world have joined the initiative by signing the Paris Declaration on Fast-Track Cities Ending the AIDS Epidemic, pledging to accelerate their AIDS responses, to reach ambitious targets, to forge strategic partnership and to address significant disparities in access to services, social justice and economic opportunity,” she added.

She said cities signing the Paris Declaration committed to seven objectives, including ending the AIDS epidemic in cities by 2030, putting people at the center of everything normal people do, addressing the causes of risk, vulnerability, and transmission.

These cities also committed to using AIDS response for positive social transformation, building and accelerating an appropriate response to local needs, mobilizing resources for integrated public health and development and uniting as leaders, she added.

The Sindh health DG said that although the health department was providing every possible support to HIV- infected people, the KMC’s support could help establish more treatment centres in the city as well as enhancing preventive activities to prevent more vulnerable people from contracting the infection.

He said Sindh had become the first province to launch the oral medicine programme in Pakistan to prevent high-risk people from contracting the HIV infection and sought the KMC’s support for reaching out to the maximum number of people to prevent the spread of HIV in Karachi.