7. World Losing AIDS fight
World Losing AIDS fight
Almost 5 million people became with HIV last year – the largest number of new infections since the disease was discovered in 1981, the annual UN AIDS Report said Tuesday.
The report was released on Tuesday in advance of the 15th International AIDS Conference in Bangkok. It called for expanded AIDS-prevention efforts.
The face of AIDS increasingly female and young – nearly half of the people infected with HIV are women and half are between the ages of 15 and 24.
Almost three million people from AIDS last year, bringing to more than 20 million the number of AIDS deaths in more than two decades. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the hardest hit region, an 25 million people are infected with HIV. The prevalence of the disease has remained relatively constant there, because three million sub-Saharans died of AIDS last year. The infection rate is so high in the countries of eastern and southern Africa that most of today's 15-year-olds will not reach their 60th birthday the infection rate slows. The average life in seven African countries for people born since 1995 is just 49.
Eastern Europe and Asia have been identified as the areas with the fasting-growing HIV rates with drug injection a primary cause. In those regions, the number of people infected with HIV has increased more than eight times in less than a decade. It has been noted the vast majority of them are under the age of 30. In Asia, an estimated 7.4 million people are infected with HIV. China, Indonesia and Vietnam the sharpest increases. India has the highest number of any country outside of South Africa.
The number of people in the United States are infected with HIV rose last year with half of the new infections in recent years occurring among African-Americans.
In Western Europe, 580,000 people are living with HIV, up from 540,000 people in 2001.
While funding for prevention and treatment has it is still less than half of what is needed in developing countries. The report called for $12 billion in annual worldwide funding by 2005. Prevention programs are not reaching the people who need them, especially two highly vulnerable groups – women and young people.
It suggested misguided priorities in the West do not help. "In high-income countries, treatment has been a much higher priority than prevention with the result being a rise in HIV transmission for the first time in a decade," the report said. "Around five to six million people in developing countries will die in the next two years if they do not receive antiretroviral treatment," it said.