(CNN) -- Since the U.N. Millennium Development Goals were launched in 2000, the world has made tremendous gains in reducing new HIV infections and helping people with HIV to live longer and healthier lives.
For a long time, efforts to ensure that a pregnant woman living with HIV would not pass the virus to her child -- during pregnancy, at childbirth, or during breastfeeding -- have lagged behind the promise of technology. But now we can say confidently that with the right efforts, we can reduce new HIV infections among children to zero, even within the short time remaining until the Millennium Development Goals are concluded at the end of 2015.
During the upcoming meeting of leaders at the U.N. General Assembly, the world's governments, NGOs and the private sector should take an important step toward reaching the goal of zero new HIV infections among children.
This can be achieved by deploying a new generation of community health workers (CHWs) who will not only help to fight AIDS but also bring other kinds of health care to the communities they are serving. UNAIDS, Columbia University's Earth Institute, many businesses and NGOs have joined forces with African governments in the 1 Million Community Health Workers Campaign to deploy this large number of CHWs across Africa by the end of 2015.
Although we've known for more than a decade that transmission of HIV from a pregnant woman to her child can be stopped through appropriate interventions -- including timely access to antiretroviral medicines -- the practical challenges to eliminating new infections are substantial. Most women in low-income countries give birth at home, without medical assistance, and usually without the benefit of prenatal care.
