GENEVA, Nov 21, 2006 (AFP) - HIV/AIDS tightened its deadly grip on the world in 2006 with 11,000 new infections every day and women increasingly at risk, the UN agency leading the global campaign against the disease said Tuesday.
Some 4.3 million people around the globe were newly infected in 2006, bringing the number living with the HIV virus to 39.5 million, an increase of 2.6 million from 2004, UNAIDS said in its annual epidemic update.
"This year's report gives us real cause for concern since the evidence shows that the global epidemic is growing in all areas," Peter Piot, the agency's executive director, told reporters
The daily rate of new infections worldwide stood at 11,000 -- 40 percent of which were in the 15-24 age group -- and the report noted a disturbing rise in the number of female victims.
"Globally, and in every region, more adult women than ever before are now living with HIV," the report said. The 17.7 million women living with HIV in 2006 represented an increase of more than one million compared with 2004.
Regionally, the sharpest increases in infection rates were in the former Soviet bloc, and South and South East Asia.
But the report sounded the alarm over a resurgence of infection rates in areas which had developed extensive prevention measures, care or treatment.
"What is perhaps of even greater concern to me is the fact that some countries that initially had real results in the fight against AIDS, such as Uganda, and western countries, we see an increase in infection rates," Piot said.
"This really has to make us think how to sustain a response to the AIDS epidemic in the long term," he added.
Piot said that the extensive use of life-prolonging anti-retroviral drugs had a negative impact on sexual behaviour in western Europe and the US.
"The evidence is clear that in western countries the introduction of treatment has led to complacency," he warned.
In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where the virus is mainly transmitted through intravenous drug use, the number of cases shot by up 70 percent to 270,000, UNAIDS reported.
For South and South East Asia, where prostitution is the biggest cause of infection, the number of new cases rose 15 percent to 860,000.
Infections climbed by 12 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and seven percent in Sub-Saharan Africa, while new infections in other geographical areas remained relatively stable against 2004 levels, the report said.
Despite the increase, UNAIDS noted that since 2000/2001, HIV prevalence among young people had declined in eight of 11 countries with sufficient data to analyse recent trends, mainly in Africa and the Caribbean.
Piot said that trend underlined the value of prevention. "I think it also gives us some real hope, that we are starting to see a return on the investment."
The report said: "The future course of the world's HIV epidemics hinges in many respects on the behaviours young people adopt or maintain."
Sub-Saharan Africa continued to bear the brunt of the epidemic, with two-thirds of all global cases.
The report cautioned that despite some declines in national HIV prevalence in the region, "such trends are currently neither strong nor widespread enough to diminish the epidemics' overall impact in this region."
The region far outstrips the rest of the world in terms of infection, with 5.9 percent of the adult population (between the ages of 15-49) living with the virus -- virtually unchanged from the six percent recorded in 2004.
The global average remains at one percent.
Access to treatment has markedly improved in recent years.
UNAIDS calculated that some two million life years were gained since 2002 in low- and middle-income countries thanks to the expanded provision of antiretroviral treatment.
UNAIDS has said recently that the epidemic as a whole in the world was slowing down globally following a peak in the infection rate in 1990.
However, the total number of HIV cases and new infections is growing due to faster population growth and the life-enhancing impact of antiretrovirals, and the epidemic is spreading into new regions, officials explained.
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