‘Getting to Zero’ on HIV/AIDS

We commemorate World AIDS Day each year on 1 December, a tradition that goes back to 1988. On World AIDS Day we remember those who have fallen to AIDS, take stock of all the years of hard work that has and is still being undertaken to reduce HIV/AIDS and to take an honest look at what is still needed to be done to achieve the ‘three zeros’—zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths.

You would be forgiven for thinking that ‘getting to zero’ was one of the Government’s aspirations for ‘levelling up’. The idea behind the levelling-up strategy is that people and communities that feel they have been left behind get a chance to catch up. ‘Getting to Zero’ is an initiative introduced by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) (2010), which aims to reduce HIV infections and HIV/AIDS-related deaths to zero. In 2019, the UK Government committed to ending new HIV transmissions in England by 2030. A new goal was set to eradicate HIV transmission, and to have no new infections in the next decade, so that the UK becomes one of the first countries to reach the UNAIDS zero infections target by 2030.