NEW DELHI, Nov 21 (AFP) - Progress has been made in tackling HIV infection in key African countries, but five million people were infected across the world in 2005 taking the total beyond a record 40 million, a UN report said Monday.
The grim AIDS epidemic claimed 3.1 million lives during the year, more than half a million of them children, the report said.
"The total number of people living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) reached its highest level, an estimated 40.3 million" up from 37.5 million in 2003, said the AIDS Epidemic Update 2005, released in New Delhi.
The report that came ahead of World AIDS day on December 1 noted that "the overall number of people living with HIV continued to increase in all regions of the world except the Carribean."
"There were an additional five million new infections in 2005," it said.
The survey warned that growing epidemics were underway in eastern Europe, Central Asia and east Asia and that the spread of HIV/AIDS was intensifying in southern Africa.
Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 64 percent of the new infections taking the number cases there to an estimated 25.8 million.
"HIV stigma and the resulting actual or feared discrimination have proven to be perhaps the most difficult obstacles to effective HIV prevention," the report said, and these factors "created an ideal climate" for the spread of the epidemic.
Only "one in 10 Africans and one in seven Asians in need of anti-retrovirals were receiving it in mid-2005."
But in some parts of Africa there were "hopeful signs" of declining national HIV prevalence. "Infection levels were dropping" in Zimbabwe, Uganda and Kenya, it said.
"There is ample evidence that HIV does yield to determined and concerted interventions," said a statement by Peter Piot, the Executive Director of the UNAIDS programme.
"We are encouraged by the gains that have been made in some countries and by the fact that sustained HIV prevention programmes have played a key part in bringing down infections.
"But the reality is that the AIDS epidemic continues to outstrip global and national efforts to contain it. It is clear that a rapid increase in the scale and scope of HIV prevention programmes is urgently needed," he said.
In Asia, which has 8.3 million cases, the epidemic was propelled by injecting drug use and commercial sex.
Drugs, sex work and weak surveillance of vulnerable groups were fuelling the HIV epidemic in Latin America and Eastern Europe as well as Asia.
Mother-to-child transmission was one of the causes for new infections in sub-Saharan Africa, the report said, predicting about 35 percent of all children born to HIV-positive women would contract the virus.
Levels of knowledge about safe sex and HIV remain low in many countries, especially in many sub-Saharan nations, and notably Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda.
Two-thirds or more of young women between 15-24 years lacked comprehensive knowledge of how HIV is transmitted, the report said.
A major poll in the Philippines two years ago found more than 90 percent of respondents believed that HIV could be transmitted by sharing a meal with an affected person.
The report said access to cheaper antiretroviral drugs had improved markedly in the past two years with more than one million people in low-and middle-income countries living longer and having better lives.
"Treatment coverage in ... Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Cuba now exceeds 80 percent, the report said, adding that better access to antiretrovirals had averted an estimated 250,000 to 350,000 deaths.
"We can now see the clear benefit of scaling up HIV treatment and prevention together and not as isolated interventions," World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Lee Jong-wook said.
"Effective prevention can also help reduce the number of individuals who will ultimately require care, making broad access to treatment more achievable and sustainable."
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