AIDS detection, treatment rise globally
But infection still spreads, UN says
JOHANNESBURG - The number of people being tested for HIV more than doubled in dozens of countries last year, improving detection of AIDS and contributing to a major surge in those being treated.
The ranks of people taking antiretroviral drugs in the developing world rose by over a million to surpass 4 million people globally, the United Nations said yesterday in its 2009 progress report on HIV and AIDS.
The vast international effort on AIDS, financed by the United States, European countries, and other donors, also ensured that growing numbers of children with AIDS, who had largely been left to die quick, unheralded deaths in past years, also benefited from the life-saving drug therapies. Their number rose to 275,700 in 2008 from 198,000 just a year earlier.
And the portion of mothers who got medicines to prevent them from infecting their babies with HIV also rose markedly in the parts of Africa hardest hit by the disease to more than half those in need.
“In the space of one year, you’re seeing a huge ramping up of AIDS services,’’ said Mark Stirling, regional director for the United Nations’ efforts against AIDS in eastern and southern Africa. “It’s unprecedented. In the acceleration and intensification of reach, 2008 was an extraordinary year.’’
But the United Nations’ progress report on AIDS also contained sobering news. Although more than a million people were put on drugs in the past year - drugs they will need for the rest of their lives - 2.7 million people were newly infected with HIV in 2007, the latest year for which there were estimates.
“We are walking backward on the treadmill,’’ said Prof. Salim S. Abdool Karim, who heads the Center for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa.
The UN report stressed that African countries this past year laid the groundwork to broadly offer men circumcisions, a surgical procedure to remove the foreskin that has been shown to lower their risk of HIV infection by more than half.
But health advocates said that leaders, particularly in Africa, would have to be far more outspoken about the practice of having more than one long-term sexual partner fueling the epidemic - and about circumcision reducing the risk of infection.
