Countries committed to nearly doubling the number of people who receive life-saving HIV treatment over the next five years as a high-level United Nations conference devoted to ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030 drew to a close Friday. During the three-day-long meeting, countries also saw the U.N.'s 193-member states commit for the first time to monitoring the quality of treatment, with a goal of getting 90 percent of those receiving anti-retroviral medicine to reduce their viral load to the point where it is undetectable â€" something that improves quality of life and reduces the risk of transmission. "It's a paradigm shift. What it's going to do is put the focus on quality. Instead of how many people have access to treatment now it's for how many people is the treatment working properly," said Sharonann Lynch, HIV & TB Policy adviser for Medecins Sans Frontiers, according to AP. In 2015, there were some 36.7 million people around the world are living with HIV and about 17 million of them have access to anti-retroviral medication, according to the U.N. At the conference, countries also committed to reducing the number of new HIV infections to below 500,000 a year by 2020, down from 2.1 million in 2015 and bringing the number of annual AIDS-related deaths to under half a million in 2020 from 1.1 million last year. "The world has an opportunity to end an epidemic that has defined public health for a generation," Michel Sidibe, head of UNAIDS said when the outcome document was adopted by member states. The United Nations is now looking to raise $13 billion over the next three years in support of these goals. Conference organizers said while remarkable progress since the last United Nations meeting on AIDS in 2011, much remained to be done. The number of new HIV infections among adults has remained mostly unchanged since 2010 and key populations like young women, sex workers, prisoners, gay men, transgender people and intravenous drug users continued to be left behind. On Thursday, the U.S. announced it would a new $100 million Key Populations Investment Fund, intended to reach these people who were most at risk.
