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Dr Parirenyatwa

Paidamoyo Chipunza Senior Health Reporter
Zimbabwe will on Monday join other countries participating at the International Aids Conference (IAC) taking place in Durban, South Africa.

Speaking at the IAC planning meeting in Harare yesterday, Health and Child Care Minister Dr David Parirenyatwa, who will lead the Zimbabwe delegation, said the key message to the conference was prevention.

Dr Parirenyatwa said for the country to achieve its targets on ending Aids, there was need to close the “tap” of new infec- tions.

“Our message is ‘let us close the tap of new HIV infections for us to win the war against HIV’,” said Dr Parirenyatwa.

Head of Aids and TB Unit in the Ministry of Health and Child Care Dr Owen Mugurungi said IAC provided countries with an opportunity to take stock of progress made so far and map out strategies going for- ward.

The IAC is held after every two years.

“So basically when we get down to Durban we are going to look at what have we done well in terms of our response efforts to HIV. This comes at a time when the world has endorsed the Sustainable Development Goals, in which one of the targets is to end Aids by 2030 and in so doing we want to fast track our response efforts to meet the 2030 targets,” said Dr Mugurungi.

He said there were going to be a lot of presentations on prevention, treatment and care of HIV with regards to achieving set targets.