U.N.: Battle against AIDS still falling short

UNITED NATIONS - The world is still falling short in its battle against AIDS, with severe gaps in prevention and treatment, the United Nations said Tuesday.

“Despite some notable achievements, the response to the AIDS epidemic to date has been nowhere near adequate,” said UNAIDS, the U.N. agency that coordinates the global campaign against the pandemic.

Since U.S. doctors first described the disease in June 1981, AIDS and the HIV virus that causes it have spread relentlessly from a few widely scattered hot spots to virtually every country in the world, infecting 65 million people and killing 25 million, UNAIDS said in a 630-page report.

India now has the largest number of AIDS infections as the spread of the disease shows no sign of letting up a quarter-century into an epidemic that has claimed 25 million lives, the U.N. reported Tuesday. With an estimated 5.7 million infections, it has surpassed South Africa’s 5.5 million.

But the epidemic still remains at its worst in sub-Saharan Africa, where per capita rates continue to climb in several countries. A third of adults were infected in Swaziland in 2005. By comparison, India’s per capita rate is low, at 0.9 percent of its 1.02 billion people.

The UNAIDS report released Tuesday documents countries’ progress and failures, and projects what must happen to keep some regions from experiencing disaster. The agency report was released a day ahead of a high-level meeting on AIDS in New York and a week prior to the 25th anniversary of the first documented AIDS cases on June 5, 1981.

Nearly 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS.

“It won’t go away one fine day, and then we wake up and say, ‘Oh, AIDS is gone,’” UNAIDS head Dr. Peter Piot told the AP in a recent telephone interview from Geneva.

Few babies are protected
The global AIDS incidence rate is believed to have peaked in the late 1990s. About 1.3 million people in the developing world are now on life-extending antiretroviral medicines, which saved about 300,000 lives last year alone.

Still, some 4.1 million people were newly infected and 2.8 million died in 2005. There were 4.9 million new infections and 3.1 million deaths in 2004.

Researchers have produced “mountains of evidence” about how to prevent and treat this disease, said the report, based on data gathered from 126 countries since December 2005.

But anti-AIDS initiatives and their results vary widely from country to country, and many are falling short of the benchmarks set in a landmark high-level U.N. General Assembly session in 2001, UNAIDS said.

“Because this pandemic and its toll cannot be reversed in the short term, we need to sustain a full-scale response for the next decades,” it said on the eve of the follow-up session opening Wednesday in New York.

Piot said one of the report’s most disturbing findings was how few babies are being protected against infection. Only 9 percent of pregnant women in poor countries are receiving services, such as access to drugs, to help prevent mother-to-child transmission, despite a UNAIDS goal of 80 percent coverage.

“The thing I’m most disappointed with and surprised about is prevention of mother-to-child transmission,” Piot said. “For HIV, the coverage is still very low and we didn’t meet the target. “Here we have something that is non-controversial; it’s about saving the babies.”

Women’s vulnerability to the disease continues to increase, with more than 17 million women infected worldwide — nearly half the global total — and more than three-quarters of them living in sub-Saharan Africa, the report found.

South Africa remains one of the world’s most tragic situations with nearly one in three pregnant women testing HIV-positive in public antenatal clinics in 2004. Nearly 19 percent of adults were infected nationwide last year, and the per capita rate is continuing to climb.

“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. “In southern Africa, HIV prevalence continues to go up, and they’re already the world record.”

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