Monday marked the twentieth anniversary of World AIDS Day. Miguel D’Escoto, the president of the United Nations General Assembly, called on the international community to intensify efforts to fight AIDS.

Miguel D’Escoto: “The simple facts that two-and-a-half million people were infected with HIV last year and another 2.1 million died of AIDS around the world underscore the huge amount of work that remains to be done.”

Meanwhile, a new United Nations report published Monday is calling for increased HIV testing for newborns as young as six weeks old.

Jimmy Kolker of UNICEF: “The weakness of health systems, especially in those eastern and southern African countries where there’s high prevalence, the public sector clinics tend to be understaffed, the staff is poorly trained, the laboratories aren’t good, and those are all obstacles to achieving the scale-up that we need in order to reach the universal access for prevention, treatment, care and support for people affected by HIV/AIDS.”