PREVIEW: UN: AIDS infections decline, still outpace treatment

Jun 8, 2008, 4:01 GMT

New York - The United Nations says the numbers of AIDS deaths and infections have declined in the last decade, but new infections worldwide have far outpaced efforts to provide anti- retroviral treatment to patients.

UN health programmes provided anti-retroviral treatment to an additional 1 million people in 2007, but in the same year a total of 2.5 million people became infected with the AIDS virus.

'Unless the international community takes immediate action to follow through on the pledges made to implement an exceptional response to HIV, the epidemic's humanitarian and economic toll will continue to increase,' the UN says in an update report to be presented to the two-day UN General Assembly's HIV/AIDS conference beginning on Tuesday.

It calls for 'strong, sustained political commitment and leadership' to fight the epidemic, which has killed more than 25 million people since AIDS was first isolated in the mid-1980s.

'True leadership is reflected in action, not words,' the UN report says.

The assembly session is called to review progress made since 2001, when the UN launched worldwide programmes to try to halt the spread of the epidemic by 2015.

At the midpoint of the ambitious programme, the UN said that progress has become 'evident' in many regions but remains uneven across and even within countries.

Fighting HIV/AIDS is part of the so-called Millennium Development Goals adopted by the assembly in 2000 to address the world's health, education, infant and maternal mortality and gender equality. The UN has been urging governments to meet the goals by 2015, and review sessions have been held to nudge forward implementation of national programmes.

The UN report says that an estimated 32.2 million people worldwide were living with HIV in December 2007. But the annual rate of new infections appeared to have declined over the last decade, with 2.5 million new infections in 2007, down from 3.2 million infections in 1998.

Women represent half of all HIV infections among adults, with 61 per cent of them in Africa's sub-Saharan nations.

There were an estimated 2.1 million AIDS deaths in 2007, down from 3.9 million in 2001, in part due to the increase in access to treatment in recent years.

The UN has called for making prevention treatment available to all HIV-infected people by 2010 in order to meet the goal of reversing AIDS by 2015.

The 147 governments that submitted data on anti-AIDS campaigns for the UN report will discuss how they implement national policies to prevent and treat the disease and which segments of society have been worst hit by the epidemic.

Anti-retroviral treatment coverage increased by 42 per cent in the last six years, reaching 3 million people in low-income and middle- income countries in 2007. The UN, the World Health Organization and anti-AIDS groups have made treatment of HIV/AIDS in parallel with tuberculosis and malaria. The UN reports that anti-TB treatment has reached only 31 per cent of those living with HIV and TB in 2007.

The report says that funding for HIV/AIDS-related activities reached 10 billion dollars in 2007 for low-income and middle-income countries, a 12-per-cent increase over 2006.