THE GLOBAL Aids epidemic is gradually being turned around, with new infections and deaths falling, but UNAids (the joint United Nations programme on HIV/Aids) warned yesterday in its annual report that, at a time of financial cutbacks, continued progress is far from certain.
After almost 30 years, there are 33.3 million people living with HIV, 22.5 million of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa. Some 5.2 million are on drug treatment to keep them alive and well, but 10 million more need it urgently. For these people, says UNAids, “the gains are real but very fragile. Future progress will depend heavily on the joint efforts of everyone involved in the HIV response.”
Last year, there were an estimated 1.8 million Aids-related deaths, which is a drop from the peak year of 2004, when 2.1 million died. There were an estimated 2.6 million new infections, which is 19 per cent fewer than the 3.1 million infected in 1999. The estimated number of orphans has risen from 10 million in 2001 to 16.6 million in 2009.
The report comes at a time when funding for HIV/Aids is being reduced in response to the world economic crisis and also the drive to put more resources into other areas of global health, such as preventing the deaths of women in childbirth. The global fund to fight Aids, TB and malaria recently failed to raise the $13bn for the next three years that it needed from donors to keep all the country programmes it finances going. “We have halted and begun to reverse the epidemic. Fewer people are becoming infected with HIV and fewer people are dying from Aids,” says Michel Sidibé, executive director of UNAids, in his foreword to the report. But, he says, it is not yet time to say “mission accomplished”.
“Growth in investment for the Aids response has flattened for the first time in 2009. Demand is outstripping supply,” he writes.
There have been dramatic improvements in 33 countries, where HIV incidence has fallen by more than a quarter between 2001 and 2009. A third of them (22) are in sub-Saharan Africa. The number of new infections in sub-Saharan Africa is down from 2.2 million a year in 2001 to 1.8 million in 2009. Some of that is a result of prevention efforts, which appear to be changing unsafe sexual behaviour and increasing condom use in some countries, while some is a result of “the natural course of HIV epidemics”.
But those countries that have stabilised still have very high HIV levels. South Africa, with an estimated 5.6 million people living with HIV last year, has the largest epidemic in the world and Swaziland, at 25.9 per cent, has the highest adult HIV prevalence.
– ( Guardianservice)