Carla Bruni in Benin for AIDS campaign

Wednesday, January 27, 2010
COTONOU: Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the First Lady of France, has begun her visit to Benin as part of her ambassador role in the fight against AIDS.

She was met on Tuesday by President Thomas Yayi Boni.

Bruni-Sarkozy, a Global Fund ambassador, last month renewed a call to eliminate the transmission of HIV from mothers to their children by 2015.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains the region most heavily affected, accounting for 67 percent of all people living with HIV and 91 percent of all new infections among children.

Around 1.2 percent of Benin's population live with HIV in the small West African country of less than 9 million people, where the first HIV case was diagnosed in 1985.

Bruni-Sarkozy described AIDS as a plague for the entire world, but said "United we can fight against these pandemic diseases."

On Wednesday today Bruni-Sarkozy and Melinda Gates, representing the Bill Gates Foundation, one of the Global Fund's biggest donors, will visit a hospital in the village of Dangbo around 100 km from the capital Cotonou.

The "House of the Redeeming Love" hospital in Dangbo specialises in programmes of protection against transmission of HIV from mother to infant.

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