Cuts to Aids prevention programmes because of the global financial crisis could lead to a surge in HIV infections, the United Nations said on Friday.
Paul De Lay, a director in the UN anti-AIDS agency, said the crisis was of great concern for development programmes as governments examined their budgets.
The world must maintain current assistance levels, he told a briefing before World Aids Day on Monday.
”[Or] what we’ll find in the next four or five years is a resurgence in new incident infections and we won’t be able to scale up the treatment that is clearly going to be needed as more and more people become symptomatic and need access to drugs,” he said.
An estimated 33-million people worldwide were living with the HIV virus, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, at the end of 2007. HIV/Aids has killed 25-million since being identified in 1981.
An estimated 2,7-million people become infected each year.
Treatment programmes which provide life-extending drugs have expanded and now reach nearly four million people, De Lay said. That fell short of the estimated 9,7-million in need of antiretrovirals.
Five new people are infected each year for every two put on treatment, De Lay said.
The Geneva-based agency said in its Aids Outlook 2009 report that even though political commitment for Aids was at an all-time high ”recent developments in the financial world will test the resilience of many”.
It identified three trends.
In Thailand, new infections arising in men who have sex with men, is at alarming levels, it said.
In Uganda, most new infections occur as a result of people having multiple sex partners.
A third trend was identified in Kenya, where many new infections occur in sex workers, injecting drug users and men having sex with men. – Reuters