UN:AIDS on the rise
The AIDS pandemic is growing in all areas of the world, with worrisome signs of resurgence in some countries that were trumpeted as successes in combating the disease, the United Nations said yesterday.
At the same time, the prevalence of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, among young people has declined in eight countries in Africa, showing that prevention efforts can work, United Nations officials said.
But over all, prevention efforts have reached far too few people at risk, like gay men, prostitutes, injecting drug users and members of minority groups, Dr. De Lay said in a telephone news conference from Geneva. He was commenting on a report issued yesterday by his agency and the World Health Organization, also a United Nations unit. Both have headquarters in Geneva.
An estimated 39.5 million people are now living with H.I.V., the report said. Of that total, 4.3 million became infected this year. There have been 2.9 million AIDS deaths in 2006, the highest number reported in any year.
The comparable figures in 2004 were 36.9 million living with H.I.V., 3.9 million new infections and 2.7 million deaths.
In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, infection rates have risen by more than 50 percent since 2004.
Cause for concern was also found in Thailand. Despite a falling overall H.I.V. infection rate there, a large percentage of new infections are among people previously considered at low risk, Dr. De Lay said. “A third of all new infections are among married women,” he said.
Infection rates in the United States and Western European countries, including England, seem to show a decline in the intensity of prevention efforts, the officials said. The number of new infections in the United States has remained stable at 40,000 for about a decade.
That rate “is not good news,” said Karen Stanecki, a senior epidemiologist at Unaids. She said the United Nations had “highlighted” those wealthy countries “because we feel they are places where prevention programs should be more focused to stop all the new infections that are occurring.”
But the officials said they were encouraged by new data showing declines in H.I.V. prevalence among young people from 2000 to 2005 in eight African countries: Botswana, Burundi, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
The trends were not sufficiently strong nor widespread to lower the overall impact of AIDS in Africa.
The report is available on the organizations’ Web sites: www.unaids .org and www.who.int.
nytimes
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