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Over the past 25 years, nearly 25 million people have died from AIDS.1HIV/AIDS causes debilitating illness and premature death in people during their prime years of life and has devastated families and communities. Further, HIV/AIDS has complicated efforts to fight poverty, improve health, and promote development by:2

  • Diminishing a person’s ability to support, work and provide for his or her family. At the same time, treatment and health-care costs related to HIV/AIDS consume household incomes. The combined effect of reduced income and increased costs impoverishes individuals and households.
  • Deepening socioeconomic and gender disparities. Women are at high risk of infection and have few options for providing for their families. Children affected by HIV/AIDS, due to their own infection or parental illness or death, are less likely to receive an education, as they leave school to care for ailing parents and younger siblings.
  • Straining the resources of communities – hospitals, social services, schools and businesses. Health care workers, teachers, and business and government leaders have been lost to HIV/AIDS. The impact of diminished productivity is felt on a national scale.
  • Through unprecedented global attention and intervention efforts, the rate of new HIV infections has slowed and prevalence rates have leveled off globally and in many regions. Despite the progress seen in some countries and regions, the total number of people living with HIV continues to rise.
  • In 2007, globally, about 2 million people died of AIDS, 33 million were living with HIV and 2.5 million people were newly infected with the virus.1
  • HIV infections and AIDS deaths are unevenly distributed geographically and the nature of the epidemics vary by region. Epidemics are abating in some countries and burgeoning in others. More than 90 percent of people with HIV are living in the developing world.3
  • There is growing recognition that the virus does not discriminate by age, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status – everyone is susceptible. However, certain groups are at particular risk of HIV, including men who have sex with men (MSM), injecting drug users (IDUs), and commercial sex workers (CSWs).
  • The impact of HIV/AIDS on women and girls has been particularly devastating. Women and girls now comprise 50 percent of those aged 15 and older living with HIV.1
  • The impact of HIV/AIDS on children and young people is a severe and growing problem. In 2007, 420,000 children under age 15 were infected with HIV and 290,000 died of AIDS.1,4 In addition to the estimated 2.1 million children living with HIV/AIDS, about 15 million children have lost one or both parents due to the disease.1,4
  • There are effective prevention and treatment interventions, as well as research efforts to develop new approaches, medications and vaccines.
  • The sixth Millennium Development Goal (MDG) focuses on stopping and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS by 2015.
  • Global funding is increasing, but global need is growing even faster – widening the funding gap. Services and funding are disproportionately available in developed countries.

Note: New estimates of HIV/AIDS infections, prevalence and deaths were reported in the UNAIDS 2007 AIDS Epidemic Update, released in November 2007.1 These estimates are lower than those cited in prior reports; numbers and trends should be interpreted with caution.

 

UNITED NATIONS MESSAGE ON WORLD AIDS DAY 2008

 GENEVA (AFP) — The United Nations on Friday urged countries to focus on the roots of the AIDS epidemic and draw on a panoply of tried-and-tested tools to help prevent HIV spreading among groups of people who most at risk.

 

"There is no single magic bullet for HIV prevention, but we can choose wisely from the known prevention options available so that they can reinforce and complement each other," said Peter Piot, the outgoing executive director of UNAIDS.

 

Launching a report ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1, Piot called for understanding how the most recent HIV infections were happening and why they occurred in the first place.

 

"Not only will this approach help prevent the next 1,000 infections in each community, but it will also make money for AIDS work more effectively and help put forward a long term and sustainable AIDS response," he said.

 

Unlike previous years, UNAIDS did not give any fresh figures for the number of infections and deaths ahead of World AIDS Day, saying the relevant data had not yet been amassed.

 

Statistics published ahead of the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City in August say that around 33 million people had the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in 2007, in a range of 30.3 to 36.1 million.

 

Around 2.7 million people became infected, or on average around 7,500 people per day, while deaths were estimated at around two million.

 

Speaking at a press briefing, UNAIDS' director of evidence, monitoring and policy, Paul De Lay, said that so-called "combination prevention" -- which involves a behavioural, biomedical and structural approach to treatment -- was key to tackling the epidemic.

 

A biomedical approach could include male circumcision, or using anti-retrovirals to prevent mother-to-child transmission, while behavioural approach could include encouraging condom use or reducing the number of sexual partners.

 

"The epidemic is constantly changing, and therefore the analyses of new infections must be undertaken at regular intervals," he said.

 

Attention had to remain focussed on the most high-risk communities such as sex workers, injecting drug users and gay men, De Lay said.

 

Meanwhile, two leading organisations shone the spotlight on access to antiretroviral drugs, which can turn HIV from a death sentence to a manageable disease.

 

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria on Friday announced that two million people living with HIV had now been reached with the lifeline treatment through programmes it supports, an increase of 43 percent increase over a year ago.

 

The Global Fund provides nearly a quarter of all international resources to fight AIDS.

 

In another development, the International AIDS Society (IAS), which organises the big international conferences, called on the Group of Eight (G8) to stand by their pledge, set down at their Gleneagles summit in 2005, for universal access to antiretroviral drugs by 2010.

 

"Based on the G8's own reporting at its July 2008 meeting in Hokkaido, Japan the IAS has calculated that G8 countries have, to date, pledged approximately 22.2 billion specifically for global HIV programmes between 2008 and 2010," the IAS said.

 

"This amount is just 36 percent of the UNAIDS-estimated 61 billion dollars that is needed over this period."

 

At the end of 2007, some three million people had access to antiretrovirals, marking a major upturn in previous years, but this was still two-thirds short of a goal of universal access of 2010 enshrined by the UN and supported by the G8.

 

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