United Nations – New surveys suggest that the global AIDS epidemic has begun to slow, with a decline in new HIV infections in about 10 countries, the head of the U.N. AIDS program said here Tuesday in the most comprehensive international report ever issued on the disease.
Elsewhere, the number of new AIDS infections continues to rise or continues at its current pace. Meanwhile, public health efforts are reaching only a small proportion of people at risk, said Dr. Peter Piot, the U.N. AIDS executive director.
“It’s a very complex epidemic,” Piot said, and “we can no longer talk about the AIDS” as a single epidemic but as many diverse ones.
India, for example, has approached South Africa as the country with the largest number of HIV infections. India has 5.7 million infected people and South Africa 5.5 million, but the difference may not be statistically meaningful.
South Africa has a prevalence rate of about 19 percent of 47 million people. In India, the rate is less than 1 percent of its population of 1.1 billion.
The most promising news, Piot said, is that the number of new HIV infections has been dropping in three African countries – Kenya, Zimbabwe and urban areas of Burkina Faso.
Earlier, Uganda reported decreases.
Piot said that Cambodia and four states in India (Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Tamil Ndau) showed a drop in new infections, joining Thailand’s earlier success.
In the Caribbean, the world’s second most affected region, behind Africa, new infections have declined in urban areas of Haiti and in the Bahamas. AIDS is the region’s leading cause of death in people ages 15 to 44 years.