UN REPORT: Twenty-five years after Aids was first recognised, the world is in better shape than ever to put an end to the disease but is falling short on many fronts, the United Nations said yesterday.
"Despite some notable achievements, the response to the Aids epidemic to date has been nowhere near adequate," said UNAIDS, the UN agency that co-ordinates the global campaign against the disease. Since US doctors first described it in June 1981, Aids and the HIV virus that causes it have "spread relentlessly from a few widely scattered hot spots to virtually every country in the world, infecting 65 million people and killing 25 million", the agency said in its 10th annual progress report.
Researchers have produced "mountains of evidence about how to prevent and treat this disease", said the report, which is based on data gathered by the UN from 126 countries since December 2005.
But anti-Aids initiatives and their results vary widely from country to country, and many are falling short of the benchmarks they set themselves in a landmark special session of the UN general assembly in 2001, the report said.
"Because this pandemic and its toll cannot be reversed in the short term, we need to sustain a full-scale response for the next decades," it said on the eve of a follow-up session opening today in New York.
Among successes since the last special session, the report cited evidence of significant behavioural changes: more people are using condoms, having fewer sex partners and starting to engage in sexual activity later in life.
The global Aids incidence rate is believed to have peaked in the late 1990s, and about 1.3 million people in the developing world are now on life-extending antiretroviral medicines, which saved about 300,000 lives last year alone. Blood for use in transfusions is now routinely screened for HIV in most countries.
Four times as many people are seeking testing and counselling today than did five years ago, according to surveys from more than 70 countries. In 58 countries reporting data, 74 per cent of primary schools and 81 per cent of secondary schools were providing Aids education. But some 4.1 million people were nonetheless newly infected and 2.8 million died in 2005. There were 4.9 million new infections and 3.1 million deaths in 2004.
Fewer than half of young people were actually knowledgeable about Aids, and small numbers of individuals injecting illegal drugs or having homosexual sex benefited from preventive services last year, the surveys found. The global supply of condoms was less than 50 per cent of what was needed, and anti-retroviral drugs, while more widely available, remained costly and hard to get.
Most important, because infected individuals still suffer from ostracism and discrimination, the vast majority of the about 40 million infected people in the world have never been tested for HIV and are unaware of their status, the report said.
While $8.9 billion (€7 billion) is expected to be available in 2006 to combat Aids in developing countries, $14.9 billion will be needed. By 2008, the agency predicted, $22.1 billion would be needed, including $11.4 billion for prevention plans alone.
The report called on national and international leaders to transform the global response to Aids from a crisis-management approach into "a strategic response that recognises the need for long-term commitment and capacity building". It recommended more funding, new safeguards to ensure the money goes to those most in need, and ambitious efforts to end the stigma attached to infected individuals.
The report called for more and better-targeted education and prevention strategies, more treatment opportunities, and more drug research, particularly on drugs for children, whose needs "have been largely left out of the research agenda". It also advised governments, "where necessary", to consider emergency mechanisms in international trade law to reduce the cost of patented Aids medications.