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New UNAIDS report warns AIDS epidemic still in early phase
UNAIDS press release, New York, 2 July 2002.
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A new report released by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in advance of the XIVth International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, warns that the AIDS epidemic is still in an early phase.
HIV prevalence is climbing higher than previously believed possible in the worst-affected countries and is continuing to spread rapidly into new populations in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe.
New data in the UNAIDS Report on the Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic indicate that theories that the epidemic might ?“level off?” in heavily affected countries, due to a decline in the pool of people at risk, are being disproved as the epidemic continues to expand even in countries that already had extremely high HIV prevalence.
In Botswana, the country with the highest HIV infection rates in the world, almost 39% of all adults are now living with HIV, up from less than 36% two years ago. In Zimbabwe, a country in which already one quarter of adults were HIV-positive in 1997, one-third were infected by the end of 2001. In five other countries, the HIV prevalence rate in adults now also exceeds 20%.
The UNAIDS report projects that, in the absence of drastically expanded prevention and treatment efforts, 68 million people will die because of AIDS in the 45 most affected countries between 2000 and 2020, more than five times the 13 million deaths of the previous two decades of the epidemic in those countries.
In a number of southern African countries, where prevalence rates are highest, up to one-half of new mothers could die of AIDS. In South Africa alone, it is estimated that at the epidemic?’s peak there will be 17 times as many deaths among people aged 15-34 than there would have been without AIDS.
The report also indicates that, in many other parts of the world, HIV has moved beyond groups considered to be at highest risk of infection and is now spreading at an accelerated pace in the wider population:
· In China, where almost all cases of HIV/AIDS were previously transmitted through injecting drug use and unsafe blood practices, the epidemic is now spreading through heterosexual contact. In Guangxi province, HIV infection rates in studies among sex workers showed an increase from 0% in 1996 to 11% in 2000, indicating a strong advance in the sexual spread of the disease there. Countrywide, reported HIV infections rose nearly 70% in just the first six months of 2001.
· Infection rates are now rising rapidly among a number of populations in Indonesia, the world?’s fourth-most populous country, following a decade of consistently low infection rates there.
· In the Russian Federation and Eastern Europe, home to the fastest growing epidemic in the world, HIV is now moving from injecting drug users into the wider population. In Ukraine, almost 25% of new infections now occur through heterosexual contact.
· In parts of Western and Central Africa, where infection rates have been high but relatively steady, there is now evidence of rapidly accelerating HIV spread. In Cameroon, for example, the adult prevalence rate, which remained in the low single digits from 1988 through 1996, is now at almost 12%.
?“These data demonstrate that HIV/AIDS is spreading rapidly in parts of the world where the epidemic had seemed stable or was previously confined to groups at highest risk of infection,?” said Dr. Peter Piot, Executive Director of UNAIDS, presenting the report at the 2002 session of the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
UNAIDS reports that, as the epidemic continues to spread in almost every part of the world, young people are at greatest risk for infection. Today, approximately half of all new adult infections are among young people aged 15-24. Almost 12 million young people are now living with HIV, and about 6,000 more become infected every day. At the same time, fourteen million children living today have lost one or both parents to AIDS, and this number will continue to grow rapidly, as the number of adults dying of AIDS rises over the coming years.
?“The unprecedented destruction wrought by the HIV/AIDS epidemic over the past 20 years will multiply several times in the decades to come, unless the fight against this disease is dramatically expanded,?” noted Dr Piot. ?“Nations with accelerating epidemics must move quickly to adopt proven responses from countries that have succeeded in turning the epidemic around.?”
[Download the full press release on the top righthand side of this page, in Word format] |
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