Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/tanzania-implements-hiv-prevention-measures-as-world-marks-aids-day Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript As part of a U.S.-backed fight against HIV infection in Tanzania, student groups perform plays and stage other events in a bid to develop new techniques that will help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. Susan Dentzer examines these programs on the eve of World AIDS Day. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, tackling AIDS through prevention. On the eve of World AIDS Day, President Bush asked for more money today to help fight AIDS. A key part of that is prevention.Our health correspondent, Susan Dentzer, has been looking at such efforts in Tanzania as part of her series on AIDS in Africa. The Health Unit is a partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. SUSAN DENTZER, NewsHour Health Correspondent: Musan Ngalula dances and sings, urging people to get tested for HIV-AIDS. He's trying to get the message to teens or young adults like him here in Tanzania. And Ngalula teams up regularly with fellow musicians in stylized native dress to drum home the message that HIV can kill. He knows that all too well. MUSAN NGALULA, Tanzanian Singer (through translator): I lost both my parents to HIV. My mother passed away in 1995, and my father died earlier, when I was in the second grade. SUSAN DENTZER: This and other outreach groups here in Tanzania are sponsored by the U.S. Global AIDS Initiative, also known as the President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief. As such, the groups are part of an urgent effort to prevent the 2.5 million new HIV infections now estimated to occur throughout the world each year. MARK DYBUL, U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator: We can't treat our way out of this epidemic. SUSAN DENTZER: Ambassador Mark Dybul is the U.S. Global AIDS coordinator overseeing the program. He says, with roughly 33 million around the world infected with HIV and as many as 8 million of those already in need of anti-retroviral treatment, the world may prove unwilling to foot the bill to put all who need them on the drugs.That's a key reason why preventing even more cases is so critical and why the program has as its target preventing 7 million new cases by 2008. If it accomplishes that, it will have met a key test of its overall success, experts say.