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AmfAR Chairman Kenneth Cole: We’re ‘Dead Set’ On Finding A Cure For AIDS By 2020
– Reported – December, 13 2014
You probably have heard Kenneth Cole’s name in conjunction with his eponymous shoe brand, but the designer has another impressive title on his resume: chairman of amfAR, the foundation for AIDS research.
In honor of World AIDS day, Cole spoke to HuffPost Live about the organization’s determination to find a cure for this life-threatening virus.
“There are still 5000 Americans who continue to die everyday of AIDS-related causes, and around the world it’s over two million*, so we have to continue to stay focused, and amfAR is dead set on finding a cure by the year 2020,” he told host Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani in a Monday interview.
“We started an initiative called ‘Countdown To A Cure,'” he continued. “It’s clearly ambitious — and at the end of the day when I tell you we will unequviocally realize that goal, I’ll tell you that if we don’t, we’ll die trying.”
A plan for curing the 35 million living with AIDS exists, according to the footwear maven. Putting it into effect is where amfAR comes in.
“There’s a research road map ultimately for this to happen,” he said. “We’ll allocate all of our resources — intellectual resources, scientific resources, financial resources — we’re trying to raise an additional 100 million dollars to help realize that goal.”
*Clarification: An amfAR representative reached out to HuffPost and corrected these two statistics. According to recent UNAIDS statistics, 1.5 million people died of AIDS last year globally, which means there are roughly 4,000 global deaths, not American deaths, per day.