World AIDS Day 2007

December 1, 2007

Credit: Clinton Foundation President Clinton greets a young boy at the Kalawati Saran Children’s Hospital in New Delhi, India on World AIDS Day, 2006.

In commemoration of World AIDS Day on December 1, the Clinton Foundation is joining with millions of people and hundreds of organizations to keep the promise— remembering not only those who have died of AIDS, but also celebrating the strength of the 33.2 million people who are currently living with HIV worldwide.

The Foundation would also like to thank those who are working day in and day out to ensure another life is not needlessly lost to this pandemic. Hundreds of men and women are at work in dozens of countries in the developing world as part of our Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI), working with the governments of these nations to improve HIV/AIDS treatment and care programs for those who need it most.

Thanks to their dedication, and the commitment of our government partners, the Foundation has been able to make widespread, high-quality care and treatment available to underserved populations living with HIV/AIDS. Since its inception in 2002, CHAI has significantly reduced the cost of life-saving antiretroviral drugs in the developing world, helping more than 750,000 people access these treatments.

We are proud of what we have accomplished, but there is so much more to do to ensure everyone living with HIV/AIDS has the ability to access lifesaving drugs and receive the care they need to live healthy lives.

While we focus our efforts on the developing world because of the startling disparity in access to high quality treatment and care, the Foundation also recognizes the serious impact of HIV/AIDS here in the United States. In Little Rock, Ark., the Clinton Presidential Center is hosting the AIDS Memorial Quilt on December 1. The quilt— the largest ongoing community arts project in the world— contains more than 40,000 panels of material memorializing nearly one-fifth of all U.S. AIDS deaths.

The quilt holds special significance to President Clinton. In Spring 2005, he told PBS’s Frontline about his visit to the quilt:

“I remember when Hillary and I walked on the Mall [in Washington, D.C.] to see the AIDS Quilt. We walked back and forth to see all the squares, and we were looking for people that we knew. We had several people that we'd known and cared about who had had HIV, and it had grown into AIDS, and they had not survived it, including someone that Hillary worked with very closely in Legal Services back in the '70s. It was a personally emotional thing, seeing the love and devotion that those sections of the quilt represented for all those people who died prematurely, and knowing that now, with medicine, they didn't have to die anymore, if we did the right things. It was a very emotional day.”

Please join us in our fight. Support our efforts or volunteer for CHAI today.