The international community has committed to ending the AIDS epidemic as a public health threat by 2030 – an ambitious target of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015.1 Interim targets have been established for 2020. This strategy describes the health sector contribution towards the achievement of these targets. It outlines both what countries need to do and what WHO will do.

This is the first global health sector strategy on viral hepatitis, a strategy that contributes to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It covers the first six years of the post-2015 health agenda, 2016–2021, building on the Prevention and Control of Viral Hepatitis Infection: Framework for Global Action, and on two resolutions on viral hepatitis adopted by the World Health Assembly in 2010 and in 2014.

Since the HIV epidemic began, the Region of the Americas has spearheaded the global response to HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), pursuing efforts based on a public health and human rights approach. While progress has been made, significant gaps and challenges persist, and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and its Member States must now strengthen their capacity to undertake innovative and effective strategies to address these epidemics and pave the way towards their elimination as public health problems.

This document has been designed to provide a framework to support local and national STI prevalence studies. The aim of these studies is to understand the burden of disease of Neisseria gonorrhoeae (NG) and Chlamydia trachomatis (CT), two priority STIs that can cause adverse birth outcomes. For this, the objective is to epidemiologically describe the prevalence of these two infections among pregnant women and, by proxy, the general population in the country.

The present global health sector strategy on sexually transmitted infections, 2016–2021 builds on conclusions from the evaluation of the implementation of the global strategy for the prevention and control of sexually transmitted infections 2006–20151 and sets out a vision, goals, targets, guiding principles and priority actions for ending the sexually transmitted infections epidemic as a public health problem.