AEGiS-AP: Report Says 33 Million Have HIV

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Report Says 33 Million Have HIV

Associated Press - Tuesday November 24 2:00 PM ET
Robert Barr, Associated Press Writer

LONDON (AP) - About 33 million people around the world are infected with HIV, two-thirds of them in sub-Saharan Africa, according to estimates in a U.N. report released Tuesday.

The report also estimated there would be 2 million AIDS deaths in the region by the end of this year, four times the total for the rest of the world.

"In Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, current estimates show that between 20 percent and 25 percent of people aged 15-49 are living with HIV or AIDS," said the report released Tuesday by the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS and the World Health Organization.

Nearly 6 million more people will be infected this year with the virus that causes AIDS, two-thirds of the cases in Africa, according to the report. "Two decades into the AIDS epidemic, we know better than ever before about prevention, how to persuade people to protect themselves, make sure they have the necessary skills and back-up services, and remove social and economic barriers to effective prevention," said Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of the U.N. program.

"Yet almost 6 million people became infected this year. Every one of these new HIV infections represents a prevention failure - our collective failure," he said.

Of the 5.8 million new infections in 1998, 70 percent were in sub-Saharan Africa, the report said. Ninety percent of the 590,000 new cases involving children under 15 were also found there.

South Africa accounted for 10 percent of all the new cases of HIV/AIDS this year, according to the report.

More than 10 percent of the adults are believed to be infected in the Central African Republic, the Ivory Coast, Djibouti and Kenya, the report said. It added that 8 percent of adults in all of sub-Saharan Africa were living with the virus.

In Zimbabwe, spot checks at 25 sites found a high incidence of HIV infection among pregnant women. At 23 of those sites, the rate was 20 percent or more; only two of the sites had rates below 10 percent, the report said.

Although combination drug therapies have reduced AIDS-related deaths in North America and western Europe, the report said rates of new infections have remained unchanged in recent years.

The report emphasized the numbers were all provisional and could not be compared directly with previous estimates.
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