40 million people now living with HIV

The United Nations Joint Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO) today launched an AIDS epidemic update report setting out new estimates of the current scale and directions of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

As of December 2001, UNAIDS and WHO estimate that 40 million adults and children are living with HIV, of whom 17.6 million are women and 2.7 million are children of both sexes under 15 years old. About one third of those currently living with HIV/AIDS are between the ages of 15 and 24.

During 2001, there were an estimated 5 million adults and children newly infected with HIV – that is, an average of 13,700 every day. This figure includes 1.8 million women and 800,000 children.

Three million deaths were attributable to HIV/AIDS during 2001, although many of these could also be due to tuberculosis (and very few would have been publicly recorded as due to AIDS).

The report sets out statistics region by region, using WHO’s regions as a basis. It uses the targets agreed at last June’s UN General Assembly Special Assembly on AIDS to assess progress and the need for more action to ensure those targets are met.

Briefly, Africa continues to have the majority of HIV and AIDS cases and all of the 16 countries where ten per cent or more of the adult population are now HIV positive.

Speaking at the London launch event, Dr Godfrey Sikipa from UNAIDS said that over the last ten years, we had shifted from talking about projections of the impact of AIDS on African societies to seeing that impact which, in some cases, showed the projections to be underestimates. He described some of the negative effects on schooling, healthcare, agriculture, government administration, and prospects for peace and security. He also drew attention to the success of some countries, most famously Uganda, in responding to the epidemic. A number of countries were now taking their national planning process out to district and local level, which made it far more realistic.

Eastern Europe and Central Asia has the fastest-growing epidemic, mainly driven by injecting drug use. There are now more people living with HIV in Eastern Europe and Central Asia than in Western Europe, despite the epidemic having started around ten years later. A massive growth in unsafe drug injecting in the former Soviet Union, and massive rises in sexually transmitted infections, imply that the epidemic is likely to become far worse in the years ahead.

The Caribbean is the second-worst affected region in the world, after Africa, with two countries (Haiti and the Bahamas) now having more than four per cent of their adult populations HIV positive. In Latin America, there is growing access to treatment and care as well as to prevention.

Asian countries have large absolute numbers of people living with HIV although as a proportion of the population, the numbers remain very low. Effective prevention campaigns could therefore be extremely valuable in protecting people’s lives and reducing the future impact of HIV. No country could be considered immune, as shown by the experience of Indonesia – as reported here in October.

Table adapted from: AIDS Epidemic update, Geneva: UNAIDS and WHO, December 2001

* Where m = millions, k = thousands, hetero = sex between men and women, IDU = injecting drug use, MSM = men who have sex with men.