About 33 million people in the world are HIV carriers and the only way to fight the disease is to prevent infection and educate the public, the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) said Tuesday.
The 2008 report on the global AIDS epidemic, produced by UNAIDS, was released Tuesday simultaneously in New York, Geneva, Johannesburg and Bangkok.
The numbers of new HIV infections worldwide decreased from 3 million in 2001 to 2,7 million in 2007, and the number of new infections among children fell from 450.000 to 370.000, the report says.
There has also been an increase in the number of patients who received some kind of treatment for the disease, which rose from 1 million to 3 million during the same time.
UNAIDS warned in its yearly report that governments will need to continue setting aside millions of dollars for AIDS treatment and prevention during the coming decades as patients live longer on AIDS medications.
UNAIDS estimates the number of AIDS case worldwide at 33 million; its previous estimate of 40 million was revised last year because of changes to how it counts cases.
Countries in sub-Saharan Africa including South Africa, Botswana and Swaziland remain the center of the AIDS epidemic. The region has about 67 percent of all people infected with HIV and 72 percent of all AIDS deaths.
The most dramatic figures are in treatment: The number of people on AIDS medication jumped by 10 times in the last six years, with some 300.000 taking AIDS drugs in 2003 compared with about 3 million in 2007.
AIDS drugs have become much cheaper and more available because of a variety of government and private programs.
Nevertheless, the AIDS epidemic is far from over, but appears to have leveled off with more people getting life-extending drugs and the number of new HIV infections falling in many places, UNAIDS said.
Global AIDS deaths numbered about 2 million in 2007, down from 2,1 million in 2006. AIDS deaths peaked in 2005 at 2,2 million after a steady climb since the disease was first identified in the early 1980s, UNAIDS said.
Brazil and Mexico continue to be the countries with the most people infected with HIV in Latin America, a region where the epidemic has been stable for a decade, UNAIDS noted. Latin America ranks third in the world in terms of number of inhabitants infected with HIV.
Of the estimated 33 million people living with HIV in 2007, 22 million were in sub-Saharan Africa, 4,2 million in South and Southeast Asia, 1,7 million in Latin America, 1,5 million in Eastern Europe and central Asia, and 1,2 million in North America.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
