UN urges prevention,education to fight AIDS
30/7/2008 17:21
About 33 million people in the world are HIV carriers and the only way to
fight the disease is to prevent infection and educate the public, the Joint
United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) said yesterday in a
communique.
The 2008 report on the global AIDS epidemic, produced by UNAIDS,
was released yesterday simultaneously in New York, Geneva, Johannesburg and
Bangkok.
The numbers of new HIV infections worldwide decreased from 3 million
in 2001 to 2.7 million in 2007, and the number of new infections among children
fell from 450,000 to 370,000, the report says.
There has also been an
increase in the number of patients who received some kind of treatment for the
disease, which rose from 1 million to 3 million during the same
time.
Anti-retroviral therapy for people living with HIV/AIDS helped reduce
the number of casualties from 2.2 million in 2006 to 2 million in 2007.
About
22 million of the global total of 33 million people infected with AIDS live in
sub-Saharan Africa, followed by some 4.2 million in southern and southwest Asia
and 1.7 million in Latin America, UN officials said at a press conference in
Mexico City.
Half of those infected are women and 2 million are
children.
In 2007, there were 2.7 million new infections worldwide, with an
average of 7,400 new cases reported every day. More than 96 percent of the new
cases occurred in low- or medium-income countries.
Also in 2007, 370,000
children under the age of 15 got infected with HIV, which meant an increase from
1.6 million in 2001 to 2 million in 2007.
Of them, 90 percent live in
sub-Saharan Africa.
Philippe Lamy, Representative of the Pan American Health
Organization (PAHO) and World Health Organization (WHO) in Mexico, said the
numbers show some improvement and change in the world scene, but added that
HIV/AIDS is still a global problem, with those infected often facing
discrimination.
Xinhua
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