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Central America Adopting AIDS
Strategies
Presidents and Vice Presidents
of Central America will meet in
San Salvador to adopt joint
strategies against AIDS, a
disease currently affecting more
than 2 million Latin Americans.
The meeting on Friday will
gather heads of State of
Guatemala, Oscar Berger;
Honduras, Ricardo Maduro; Costa
Rica, Abel Pacheco and host
Antonio Saca, presidential
secretary of communications,
Walter Hernandez confirmed.
Nicaragua and Panama will be
represented by their vice
presidents or Health ministers.
During the meeting, the Pan
American Health Organization (PAHO)
will present its Regional
Strategic Plan against AIDS,
including patients´access to
comprehensive care,
antiretroviral drugs, to halve
the number of new infections by
year 2010 and curb the incidence
of mother-child transmission by
year 2015.
A world campaign on Childhood,
Youth and AIDS, promoted by the
United Nations Children´s Fund
(UNICEF), will be launched at
the end of the meeting.
The purpose of UNICEF is to call
the attention to the "lost
faces" of the pandemic that
every minute kills a child under
15 in the world, said UNICEF
representative in El Salvador
Miriam de Figueroa.
Central America and the
Caribbean are areas of higher
incidence of AIDS in the region,
where countries such as
Guatemala, Belize, Honduras,
Panama, Jamaica, Barbados and
the Dominican Republic have more
than one percent of the
population infected, according
to UNICEF.
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