This is due to the United States (US)  government’s withdrawal of funding to President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded clinics.

In January, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order to stop foreign aid affecting USAID and PEPFAR funded clinics globally.

Venter has attributed the increase in HIV infections to government’s failure to restore HIV healthcare following the withdrawal of funding.

He says urgent action is required.

“We haven’t seen the movement at the rate it was promised. We’ve seen a drop in testing for instance, we’ve seen a 20-percent reduction across the country in testing of infants who are born to women with HIV. Which again, suggests an unraveling of the programme around transmission to babies, which is one of the biggest benefits we’ve seen over the last 20 years. We’ve gone from 70 000 children born in a year with HIV to about 2 000 to 3 000. So, these are all fantastic things about the HIV programme that the Department of Health rightly can feel proud about but which is now going to start unraveling over the course of this year and by next year we’re going to start seeing lots of new infections, lots of deaths if they don’t fix this and fix it quickly.”

--SABC--