Aids-related deaths in South Africa: 1 801 518 at noon on May 31
Looking to the future: Twenty-five years after the first Aids cases were reported, there is no sign of a halt to the pandemic which is likely to spread to every corner of the globe, the head of the United Nations’s Aids agency has said.
Peter Piot was speaking as UNAids released a report that declares the world’s response to the disease, which has infected about 65-million people and killed 25-million, has been nowhere near adequate. Five years after a special UN session pledged its commitment to halting the Aids pandemic, only a few countries have met the targets laid down.
‘I think we will see a further globalisation of the epidemic spreading to every single corner of the planet,” said Piot. ‘It won’t go away one fine day, and then we wake up and say, ‘Oh, Aids is gone.’ I think we have to start thinking about looking at the next generations. There’s an increasing diversity in how the epidemic looks.”
India has the largest number of people living with the virus. With 5,7-million infections, it has overtaken South Africa’s total of 5,5-million. But the epidemic it still at its worst in sub-Saharan Africa, where 90% of the world’s HIV-infected children live. ‘I think in Africa, it is only comparable in demographic terms to the slave trade regarding the impact it has had on the population,†Piot said.
The report shows clear prevention strategies have been worked out, there is more funding, and drug treatment is slowly reaching those in the poorest countries.
By the end of last year, there were 1,3-million people in the developing world on anti-retroviral drugs, averting between 250 000 and 350 000 deaths.
‘We know what needs to be done to stop Aids,” says the report. ‘What we need now is the will to get it done.” It calls for ‘active and visible leadership” from heads of state and governments.
The report is launched on the eve of a high-level meeting at the UN in New York to assess progress over the past five years and chart the way forward. —