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U.N. says 39.5 million people have HIV
By ELIANE ENGELER,
Associated Press Writer
GENEVA - The global HIV epidemic is growing, leaving an estimated 39.5
million people worldwide infected with the deadly virus, the United Nations
said Tuesday.
AIDS has claimed 2.9 million lives this year and another 4.3 million people
became infected with HIV, according to the U.N.'s AIDS epidemic update
report, published on Tuesday. Spread of the disease was most noticeable in
East Asia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
AIDS has killed more than 25 million people since the first case was
reported in 1981, making it one of the most destructive illnesses in
history.
"In a short quarter of a century AIDS has drastically changed our world,"
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said at a staff meeting Monday in Geneva.
"AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria make up the deadliest triad the world has
known."
But he said improvement in treatment, more resources and higher political
commitment over the past 10 years gave rise to optimism.
The joint report by UNAIDS and the World Health Organization acknowledged
that access to HIV/AIDS treatment has made a great leap forward in recent
years, enabling many infected people to live longer. But it said much
remained to be done, especially in prevention.
Sub-Saharan Africa — with 63 percent or 24.7 million of the world's infected
people — bears the highest burden, but in East Asia, Eastern Europe and
Central Asia there are 21 percent more people living with HIV than two years
ago.
The virus spread fastest in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, with a nearly
70 percent increase in new infections over the past two years. In South and
Southeast Asia, the number of new infections has grown by 15 percent since
2004, while it rose by 12 percent in North Africa and the Middle East. In
Latin America, the Caribbean and North America it remained roughly stable.
All regions of the world have had an increase in the number of people living
with the deadly virus over the past two years, the report said. In some
countries this was due to better access to medicine keeping people alive
longer.
Never before have so many women been infected with HIV. There are 17.7
million women worldwide carrying the virus, an increase of more than 1
million compared with two years earlier. The proportion of women among the
infected is particularly striking in sub-Saharan Africa where they account
for 59 percent of the people with HIV/AIDS.
The report doesn't break down the estimates country by country, but it said
the United States — for which figures were available for 2005 only — had 1.2
million people living with HIV last year. The U.S. therefore ranks among the
top 10 countries in terms of infected people.
Unprotected sex in prostitution and between men, as well as unsafe drug
injecting represent the highest risks for HIV infection and the main reasons
for the spread of the disease in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, it
said.
After sub-Saharan Africa, Asia is the second most infected region. Almost 8
million of the world's people with HIV/AIDS live in South and South East
Asia. The report said there is increasing evidence for HIV outbreaks among
men who have sex with each other in Cambodia, China, India, Nepal, Pakistan,
Vietnam and Thailand, but it said few of these countries' AIDS programs
really address the problem of sex between males.
In North America, an estimated 1.4 million people are infected, which
represents a steady increase over the past few years mainly due to the
life-prolonging impact of antiretrovirals.
In the United States, people from racial and ethnic minorities are more
affected by the epidemic, with half of the AIDS diagnoses between 2001 and
2004 among African Americans and 20 percent among Hispanics.
But infected people in the U.S. have been benefiting from more effective
treatment over the past few years, leading to a 21-percent increase of
infected people surviving two years or longer since the early 1990s.
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