UN/HIV: The spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic across the globe is speeding up, in spite of intensifying efforts on the part of UN agencies, the US and other European governments to turn the tide. A record five million people were infected by the virus last year and nearly three million died.
The UN's latest bi-annual report on the state of the pandemic made it plain yesterday that the HIV virus that causes AIDS is defeating man's best efforts to contain it. There are 38 million people carrying the virus, sub-Saharan Africa is being devastated, and the fastest spread is in Asia and eastern Europe.
"More people than in any previous year became infected with HIV. That is clearly a failure to reach the people who need it with prevention methods. More people than ever before died of AIDS. That is a failure to reach them with treatment," said Dr Peter Piot, executive director of Unaids, at the launch of the report in London yesterday. The epidemic, he said, is reaching its global phase, and is no longer is a problem largely confined to sub-Saharan Africa.
One in every four new infections is occurring in Asia, where huge populations are at risk, said the report, published just before the international AIDS conference in Bangkok which opens this weekend. There have been sharp increases in the numbers infected in China, Indonesia and Vietnam, while India alone has 5.1 million people with HIV - the second largest number infected in any country, after South Africa.
In eastern Europe and central Asia, 1.3 million have the virus, spread largely by injecting drug use. Russia, with more than three million injecting drug users and 860,000 with HIV, is one of the worst hit.
It is a dispiriting picture, because more work and money is going into the battle against the world's worst disease outbreak than ever before, both in helping people to protect themselves against contracting the virus and more recently in efforts to get drugs that can prevent HIV developing into Aids to people in poor countries.
But still not enough is being done, said Dr Piot. "The world is falling short on prevention. Preventing new infections will at the end of the day stop this epidemic," he said. "Only one in five who need it have access to HIV prevention - [such as] education of children in schools, access to condoms and access to clean needles for those who are injecting drugs."
There had been some progress on treatment, he said, but too little. There are now about 440,000 people in the developing world on AIDS drugs, which keep the level of the virus in the blood low, although they are not a cure. Half of those people are in Brazil, although the drugs are becoming more available in Asia. Where they are most needed - in sub-Saharan Africa with its 25 million infected and where 2.2 million people died of AIDS last year - the antiretroviral drugs that can keep people alive are still rare. Treatment, said Dr Piot, "is still dramatically, shockingly low in Africa". He expects it to improve. The World Health Organisation has set a target of three million people on treatment by 2005 and international funds are being made available to poor countries.