AIDS death toll passes 25 million: UNAIDS

AIDS has killed 25 million people worldwide, but new infections are slowing sharply, the UN said in an annual report on the crisis Tuesday that mixes hope with a warning against complacency.

Almost 60 million people have been infected by the HIV virus since it was first recorded, but prevention programs are having a significant impact, The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS said in its report, released in Shanghai.

Around 2 million people died of the disease in 2008.

Michel Sidibe, UNAIDS' executive director, said at a Shanghai press conference on the report's launch that the number of new human immunodeficiency (HIV) virus infections has been reduced by 17 percent over the past eight years.

"The good news is that we have evidence that the declines we are seeing are due, at least in part, to HIV prevention,"Sidibe said.

Some of the most notable progress has been reported in Africa, the report said.

HIV infections have fallen by 25 percent since 2001 in East Africa, while the figure for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole was around 15 percent – equating to around 400,000 fewer infections in 2008.

Sidibe said treatment products had increased tenfold in the past five years, leading to an 18 percent decline in mortality since 2001.
But he added that better prevention strategies were needed to stop new infections.

"The findings show that prevention programming is often off the mark and that if we do a better job of getting resources and programs to where they will make the most impact, quicker progress can be made and more lives saved."

It estimated that around 2.9 million lives have been saved since 1996, when more effective treatment became available.

"International and national investment in HIV treatment scale-up has yielded concrete and measurable results. We cannot let this momentum wane,"said Margaret Chan, head of the UN's World Health Organization.

Source: Global Times