UN Report: 4.3 Million More People Got AIDS This Year

"In a short quarter of a century, AIDS has drastically changed our world," said U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan at a staff meeting Monday in Geneva. "AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria make up the deadliest triad the world has ever known."

Since the first AIDS case was reported in 1981, there have been more than 25 million people killed worldwide by the virus. The United Nations said Tuesday in its AIDS epidemic update report that the global epidemic is growing, with an estimated 39.5 million people worldwide infected with the deadly virus. AIDS has claimed 2.9 million lives this year so far, and another 4.3 million people have become infected with HIV.

The report, which was a joint collaboration between UNAIDS and the World Health Organization, said that although improved access to HIV/AIDS treatments have enabled many infected people to live longer, there is still much more to be done in the way of prevention. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 24.7 million (63%) of the world’s infected people. But the areas where the disease has spread most quickly are in Eastern Europe and Asia. There are 21% more people in those areas living with HIV than there were just two years ago.

The report’s grim statistics also showed that there are more women infected with HIV than ever before. There are 17.7 million women in the world who are infected, which is an increase of more than 1 million in just the past two years. The proportion of infected women in sub-Saharan Africa is particularly shocking, because in those areas they account for 59% of the people infected.

In North America, an estimated 1.4 million people are infected, with approximately 1.2 million of those people living in the United States. In the US, the epidemic most affects people of racial and ethnic minorities, with half of the new AIDS diagnoses between 2001 and 2004 being among African-Americans and 20% among Hispanics. However, infected people in the US are benefiting from the increases in effective treatment that have been developed in recent years. Since the early 1990s, there has been a 21% increase in the number of infected people surviving two years or longer.

According to the report, the main reasons for the spread of the disease in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America is unprotected sex with prostitutes and between men, as well as unsafe injections of drugs. After sub-Saharan Africa, Asia is the second most infected area of the world, with almost 8 million people with HIV/AIDS living in South and Southeast Asia. The report found an increase in outbreaks among men who have had sex with each other in Cambodia, China, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Thailand. However, the report added that the AIDS programs being used in these countries rarely address the problem of sex between men.