Within three years, another 500,000 Americans, Canadians and Europeans will become infected with the AIDS virus.
And worldwide, the epidemic is worsening far faster than previously thought, and will infect 30 million to 40 million people within eight years.
These are among the conclusions released yesterday by the World Health Organization in Geneva in a report, "Current and Future Dimensions of the HIV-AIDS Pandemic."
Four years ago the United Nations agency forecast that 15 million to 20 million people would be infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, by 2000.
"It's spreading quickly, especially in developing countries, primarily by heterosexual means," Dr. Michael Merson said in an interview. Merson heads the Global Program on AIDS at the World Health Organization. "More than 90 percent of the new cases are heterosexual transmissions."
In the United States, where intravenous drug use and homosexual transmission account for most cases, the AIDS case rate from heterosexual transmission has doubled in 10 years, now accounting for more than 6 percent of cases reported to the federal Centers for Disease Control since 1981.
In the past 11 months, more than 1 million people worldwide have become infected with HIV, according to the World Health Organization. Currently, 10 million carry HIV, of whom 1 million are in the United States and Canada. And 1.5 million people have advanced to AIDS, or have died as a result of the disease. Another 4 million people have developed life-threatening tuberculosis, which seems to be increasingly piggy-backing on the AIDS epidemic.
The 1980s was the decade of HIV spread, Merson said. Because it takes about 10 years to develop AIDS, the 1990s will witness a tenfold increase in AIDS cases and deaths. That, he said, means a tenfold increase in the economic, emotional and social costs of the pandemic.
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