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World AIDS Day and Affirm

1 December 2010

Find out today, World AIDS Day, what work Affirm is doing to help local communities respond to HIV...

World AIDS Day and Affirm

Not just the first day of advent, December 1st is also World AIDS Day (WAD), when campaigners from around the world come together annually to raise awareness of HIV and AIDS. 

The WAD campaign has been led by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) since 2004, a programme that is supported by InterHealth’s umbrella organisation, Affirm.

Affirm's work

Affirm helps facilitate local communities to respond effectively to HIV and AIDS, complementing the methods used by UNAIDS, by stimulating local community responses and helping to design ways for scaling out national responses to HIV.

Co-ordinator of Affirm and InterHealth doctor Dr Ian Campbell believes that the people centric approach both organisations take is central to preventing HIV infections.

“At a time when there are five new HIV infections for every two people who begin anti-retroviral treatment, there is a compelling case for looking again at the human factor in care and prevention,” says Ian.

“For this reason UNAIDS is proposing that ‘combination prevention’ is the foundation for effective response. Affirm and partners are fully supportive of the realisation that people connecting to people matter most in spreading prevention motivation and action. The combination of people driven community movements supported by commodities and new technologies is the basis of the UNAIDS Geneva staff prevention workshop series currently facilitated by Affirm.”

This idea remains the core of programme design facilitated by Affirm for work in primary health care in Ghana and Malawi, and the work of Melbourne based Global Reconciliation work in Gaza and Calcutta.

Find out more about the work Affirm does. 

To find out more about the World Aids Campaign visit their website or show your support by retweeting our twitter post about it!