InterPress News Service (IPS) - Wednesday, November 26, 1997.
Thalif Deen

The deaths represented a 50 percent increase in 1996 figures and the 1997 total also accounted for "one-fifth of the total of 11.7 million AIDS deaths, recorded since the beginning of the epidemic in the late 1970s," the study said.

The 1997 victims of Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) included included 460,000 children and 46 percent of all deaths were women, the study said.

"The more we know about the AIDS epidemic, the worse it appears to be," says Peter Piot, Executive Director of UNAIDS, a joint U.N. programme fighting the deadly disease caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). "We are now realizing that rates of HIV transmission have been grossly underestimated - particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where the bulk of the infections have been concentrated to date."

South Africa now estimates that one in 10 adults are living with HIV - up by more than a third since 1996. And in Namibia, AIDS now kills nearly twice as many people as malaria, the next most common killer.

The study - titled "Report on the Global HIV/AIDS epidemic" - says that more than 30 million adults and children are now believed to be living with HIV infection. If current transmission rates hold steady, the number of people living with HIV/AIDS will soar to 40 million by the year 2000.

According to the report, AIDS is steadily declining in rich industrialised nations while it is spreading with rapid intensity in the world's poorer nations.

The growing gap between the developed and developing world concerns not only the scale of HIV spread but also mortality from AIDS. In North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand, newly-available antiretroviral drugs are reducing the speed at which HIV-infected people develop AIDS.

In Western Europe, evidence suggests that new AIDS cases will drop by around 30 percent in 1997 compared with 1995, before antiretroviral treatment became available.

The decline is greatest in countries in which infection has been concentrated in homosexual men, in whom HIV rates began dropping five to 10 years earlier.

"This shows that the decline in AIDS cases is often the combined result of better prevention and better treatment," the study notes.

Only in Portugal and Greece, where unsafe drug injecting is the main mode of transmission, are new AIDS cases still showing substantial rises compared with a year ago.

In the United States, newly-published figures indicate that the first annual decrease in new AIDS cases - 6.0 percent - occurred in 1996, and an even bigger decrease is expected in 1997. Again, the largest fall - a drop of 11 percent - was in homosexual men, the very group which sought and benefited from the most open exchange of information about the risks of unprotected sex in the early years of the epidemic.

The study points out that in some disadvantaged sections of society, AIDS continues to rise. Among Afro-Americans, for example, new AIDS cases rose by 19 percent among heterosexual men and 12 percent among heterosexual women in the U.S. in 1996. In the Hispanic community, there were 13 percent more cases among men and five percent more among women than a year earlier.

This is partly because these communities may find it hard to access the expensive new drugs that could stave off the onset of AIDS, according to the study.

"It is partly, too, because prevention efforts in minority communities, where tranmission is often through heterosexual intercourse and drug injecting, have been less successful than in the predominantly well-educated and well-organised white gay community," the study said.

Piot of UNAIDS says that the World AIDS Campaign has helped to draw the attention of political leaders and communities around the world to the devastating effect of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the lives of young girls and boys.

"Much of the future course of this epidemic will be determined by our ability to ensure that the rights of these children and young people are protected - not only that they are given essential care and support but also that they are given access to education and information about how HIV is transmitted and to the means to avoid it,"he said.

UNAIDS is jointly funded by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) and the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). (END/IPS/td/97)

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