The International AIDS Day was observed in Pakistan on Thursday with an aim to unite people in the fight against the disease, and to ask for their support for people infected with HIV. The theme of the World AIDS Day 2011 is “Getting to Zero” by striving for zero new infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths. The World AIDS Day was the first ever global health day, and the first commemorated in 1988. Today, many scientific advances have been made in the HIV treatment, and there are laws to protect people living with HIV.
Experts emphasised on more progress on education, prevention, testing, and treatment of HIV-AIDS to achieve the ambitious goal of completely halting the spread of the deadly disease. According to UNAIDS estimates, the number of people living with HIV-AIDS in Pakistan is 97,400, out of which about half live in Sindh, with 80 percent of them in Karachi. In other words, Karachi alone has a population of 40,000 people living with HIV-AIDS.
