The Associated Press - Tuesday, November 23, 1999
Sue Leeman, Associated Press Writer

The U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS and the World Health Organization said it expected the number of infections worldwide to continue to grow, fueled by an increase in the use of injected drugs.

According to the report, 33.6 million people, including 1.2 million children, are carrying HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

That compares to 33.4 million people who were HIV positive last year. However, the agencies said this year's increase is even larger than it appears because the 1998 figures in a few heavily populated Latin American and Asian countries were "overestimated."

"With an epidemic of this scale, every new infection adds to the ripple effect, impacting families, communities, households and increasingly, businesses and economies," Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, said at a London news conference.

But he said the world "is at a turning point" in responding to the epidemic. "Never before have so many heads of state spoken out ... (and) more investments are being made by the development agencies of the richer countries," Piot said.

The agencies said that in 1999 alone, 5.6 million people will have become infected with HIV.

This year also will see 2.6 million deaths from AIDS, the highest annual global total since the disease began to take hold in the late 1970s - despite so-called antiretroviral drugs that staved off AIDS deaths in the richer countries, they said.

Some 2.2 million people died of AIDS last year. And more than 16 million people have now died of the disease, which destroys the body's immune system, since the late 1970s, the agencies said.

But even if prevention programs manage to cut the number of new infections to zero - which is highly unlikely - deaths will increase for some years, the report said.

The report said about half of all people who acquire HIV become infected before they turn 25 and typically die before their 35th birthdays.

Ninety-five percent of people with HIV live in the developing world, a proportion that is likely to grow as infection rates continue to rise in countries where poverty, poor health systems and limited resources fuel the spread of the virus, it said.

The report said sub-Saharan Africa continues to be worst hit, with close to 70 percent of the global total of those with HIV.

But the report added that battling HIV rates is still a challenge in industrialized countries of the West, where there is "extremely worrying evidence" that safe sexual practices are declining among gay men. While AIDS deaths in the United States decreased by 42 percent between 1996 and 1997, the figure dropped by only half that between 1997 and 1998.
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