25 Million Dead

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AIDS toll soars past 25 million

David Nason, New York correspondent
November 23, 2005
THE number of people with HIV worldwide has exceeded 40 million for the first time, with more than 2.6 million adults and almost 600,000 children dying from AIDS in the past year.

The figures, released at UN headquarters in New York, reveal the relentless rise of HIV infection, which leads to AIDS. It has now claimed more than 25million lives since the early 1980s, making it one of the most destructive epidemics in history. The vast majority of cases are in the developing world.

The report, by the Joint UN Program on HIV-AIDS and the World Health Organisation, estimated there would be an extra 5 million infections globally this year. Only a handful of countries have made serious efforts to stop HIV infection, the annual report said.

Worldwide, less than one in five people at risk has access to basic prevention services and only 10 per cent of people with HIV have been tested and made aware of the infection.

In Australia, 27 per cent of the 820 new cases of HIV-AIDS reported this year were a result of sex between men and women. This is up from the 7 per cent rate of heterosexually transmitted cases in 1995, raising concerns about the effectiveness of HIV-AIDS awareness programs among young people.

The report shows HIV-AIDS increasing in every region of the world except the Caribbean, where it is at the same level as in 2003.

Australia has an estimated 14,800 people with HIV-AIDS. The numbers have increased each year since 2000. But between 1995 and 2000 there was a 25per cent reduction in cases nationally.

Globally, 40.3 million people have HIV-AIDS. In what has been called the "feminisation" of the disease, 17.5million of these are women. Tragically, 2.3million are children under 15. Children represent 700,000 of the 4.9 million people infected this year.

The report says 3.1 million people have died as a result of AIDS this year - 2.6 million adults and 570,000 children.

This coincides with a new study suggesting Africa's trade in "bushmeat" - butchered chimpanzees, monkeys and gorillas - could be widening the risk of new AIDS-type diseases.

The research, published in the latest issue of the US journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, supports studies claiming HIV-AIDS originated in apes.

In the new research, scientists tested villagers from remote areas of Cameroon, who hunted primates for food or kept them for pets, for signs of simian immunodeficiency virus and compared the rate of infection with people from the country's urban centres. More than 17per cent of villagers tested positive to SIV compared with 2.3 per cent of the general population.

UNAIDS executive director Peter Piot said the epidemic was continuing to outstrip containment efforts.

"It is clear a rapid increase in the scale and scope of HIV prevention programs is urgently needed," he said. "We must move from small projects with short-term horizons to long-term comprehensive strategies."

While sub-Saharan Africa remains the world's most AIDS-afflicted region, with 65 per cent of all new cases, the infection rate is increasing fastest in eastern Europe and central Asia, with shared use of needles among drug users to blame.

The report says HIV-AIDS is almost out of control in Pakistan and Indonesia.

Of the 11,200 cases of HIV-AIDS reported in the 21 Pacific nations, 10,000 were in Papua New Guinea, although the report suggests the real PNG numbers could be five times higher.

The bright spots in the report were Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda and some of the Caribbean nations, which reported declines in HIV rates. In Kenya, infection rates have dropped from 10 per cent of the adult population in the late 1990s to 7 per cent.

Jim Kim, director of the World Health Organisation's HIV-AIDS division, said integrated strategies covering a wide range of measures were needed to step up the global fight.

The measures included sexual abstinence, changed behaviour, greater use of condoms and methadone and needle exchange programs to prevent transmission by intravenous drug use.

"We'll never really know for sure exactly what particular intervention led to a particular change in a person's behaviour, so what we recommend is that the full range of preventions and interventions must be utilised," Dr Kimsaid.

"Any time you take one or the other factor out of it for ideological or political reasons, you are really putting a country and individuals at risk."

Dr Kim said that in the Middle East it was conservative Iran that had taken the lead in introducing prevention programs, while China had ditched its policy of denial and was now looking positively at prevention programs.

However, Dr Kim said HIV-AIDS was still seen as a "barometer of morality" and that many countries gave the disease a stigma not associated with other diseases.

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