Fewer people dying of HIV/Aids

FEWER PEOPLE are being infected with HIV or dying of Aids-related illnesses thanks to improved drugs, wider access to treatment and better education programmes, a United Nations report has said.

Health experts have warned, however, that progress could be undermined by governments cutting spending on healthcare and medical research in response to the economic crisis.

The findings from the UNAids programme show that some 34 million people are now living with HIV/Aids, but that new HIV infections and Aids-related deaths fell last year to their lowest levels since the peak of the epidemic.

About 2.7 million people contracted HIV in 2010, 21 per cent fewer than at the highest point of the infection rate in 1997, and some 1.8 million people died of illnesses caused by Aids, down from 2.2 million in 2005.

About 390,000 children were born with HIV last year, the UN said, compared to 560,000 at its height in 2002, while Aids-related deaths in children younger than 15-years-old decreased by 20 per cent in five years.

Almost 50 per cent of those eligible for anti-retroviral drugs were now receiving them, including 6.6 million people in some of the world’s poorest countries – an increase of 1.35 million people in a single year.

“We’ve never had a year when there has been so much science, so much leadership and such results,” said Michel Sidibe, executive director of UNAids.

“We have seen a massive scale up in access to HIV treatment which has had a dramatic effect on the lives of people everywhere . . . Even in a very difficult financial crisis, countries are delivering results in the Aids response.”

International funding for HIV/Aids programmes actually fell last year however, fuelling fears that the economic woes could derail efforts to combat the epidemic. “Never, in more than a decade of treating people living with HIV/ Aids, have we been at such a promising moment to really turn this epidemic around . . . but this means nothing if there is no money to make it happen,” said Tido von Schoen-Angerer of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).

Sharonann Lynch, a HIV policy adviser at MSF, said financial constraints could hamper programmes in sub-Saharan Africa, where some 5 per cent of adults suffer from the disease – by far the highest prevalence in the world.

“Just at the moment when we know how to manage HIV, we’re hitting the brakes,” she said. “Without more investment, we’ll be squandering the best chance we have of getting ahead of the new wave of infections.”

Although the new infections rate in sub-Saharan Africa was down 26 per cent last year from its peak, the region is home to some 68 per cent of all people living with HIV.

South Africa is the country worst hit by HIV/Aids, with more than 10 per cent of its 50 million people infected.

In eastern Europe and central Asia 1.5 million people now live with HIV/Aids – a 250 per cent increase in nine years that is mostly due to drug users sharing dirty needles.