LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The State Department has new data on the U.S.'s work on HIV/AIDS around the world. The department says that data shows things are working well. But as NPR's Gabrielle Emanuel reports, HIV experts dispute that take and they're warning funding cuts could help the virus spread.
GABRIELLE EMANUEL, BYLINE: PEPFAR, or the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, is lauded for having saved over 26 million lives since President George W. Bush launched it in 2003. It was also lauded for regularly providing high-quality data on the HIV epidemic, but the data haven't been released since President Trump returned to the White House and overhauled foreign aid until now.
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JEREMY LEWIN: The numbers are very, very good.
EMANUEL: Jeremy Lewin of the State Department is hailing the new treatment figures that came out Friday afternoon as a sign of success. The numbers show the U.S. supported some 20 million people globally on HIV treatment as of September last year. That's roughly the same number as a year prior.
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LEWIN: People will be surprised at how resilient our health programs are and have been.
EMANUEL: But many HIV experts find that statement misleading. They say the other numbers are worrisome. They show that a delicate system for preventing and finding HIV cases has been severely disrupted. Brian Honermann is with amfAR, the foundation for AIDS research.
BRIAN HONERMANN: About 24% of the frontline health care workers are no longer there. They're no longer being supported.
EMANUEL: He says without those health workers, the numbers show big drops in testing for HIV and new people starting treatment.
HONERMANN: It's hundreds of thousands of people that we would have expected to see, and those people are now just missing.
EMANUEL: That's bad news for their own health. And he points out it also allows the virus to continue to spread and potentially resurge.
Gabrielle Emanuel, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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