The promise was that by 2020, no child will be born with HIV or newly infected with HIV during breastfeeding across the world. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic posed an unprecedented challenge to health systems, the progress towards the HIV-related 2020 goalpost, despite some commendable gains, was not very encouraging.
Despite global efforts to prevent HIV transmission, 150,000 children were either born with or were newly infected with HIV during breastfeeding in 2019, bringing the total number of children (aged 0 to 9 years) living with HIV to 1.1 million. Also, about 310 children died from AIDS-related causes every day in 2019, mostly because of inadequate access to HIV prevention, care and treatment services.