Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1996. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia, Inc. - Thursday, 28 November 1996.

One and a half million people have died of AIDS this year, 350,000 of them children. About 42 percent of those infected with HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS, are women and the proportion is growing, it said.

"The epidemic is not over -- far from over -- not even close," Dr Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, the joint U.N. program on AIDS and HIV, told a news conference.

"It is even gaining momentum in some parts of the world."

Piot presented a grim catalog of U.N. statistics for the year in a report marking World AIDS Day on December 1. He said there were now more than 22 million people with HIV infection or AIDS, with 3.1 million new infections in 1996.

"This works out at about 8,500 a day...1,000 in children," the report said.

There has been a decline in infection in industrialised countries in Europe and the United States, but this sometimes disguised a shift in the epidemic to poorer populations.

"Results from several (U.S.) studies suggest that the HIV epidemic has now spread to a new generation of homosexual and bisexual men," the report said.

"Information from the United Kingdom indicates that the declining trend in male-to-male transmission observed here in the late 1980s may have begun to reverse as early as 1990."

Piot acknowledged the hope that had been gained from new drugs that seem to control the virus. "That is certainly good news, but not good news for everybody. New combination drug therapy can only be a dream for most people," he said.

"We must remember that 90 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS are in developing countries with little access to health care. The only true hope for the entire world is prevention -- education efforts, new forms of protection, and development of a vaccine."

Piot added: "We desperately need a vaccine...If we can make drugs against HIV we can also make a vaccine."

But drug companies were reluctant to work on vaccines, partly because one would have to be sold inexpensively and for fear of expensive lawsuits following any side-effects.

They were instead concentrating on drugs to treat the infection. "But I fear the idea that HIV can be a controllable disease can spawn complacency," he said. "People who believe we are not facing an epidemic must be blind."

About 63 percent of infected people live in Africa, the report added. Fifty percent of all hospital beds in Uganda go to AIDS patients, but education efforts seemed to have slowed the spread there.

Asia is still a main area of worry. "HIV is spreading explosively in some parts of India," the report said.

"In Bombay, over a very short period of time, HIV prevalence has reached 50 percent in sex workers, 36 percent in patients with sexually transmitted diseases and 2.5 percent in women attending clinics for antenatal care."

HIV was spreading with "alarming speed" in Eastern Europe.

"In Nikolayev, which borders the Black Sea in Ukraine, the percentage of HIV-infected people among injecting drug users exploded from 1.7 percent in January 1995 to 56.5 percent just 11 months later."

"All this is very gloomy but there is some reason for hope," Piot said. Studies showed treating sexually transmitted diseases could greatly cut HIV infection rates, and education efforts in Thailand, for example, had cut infection among army recruits.

And in some places in Africa teenagers were putting off their first sexual experience and seemed to be reducing the number of sexual partners.

An agreement to make the female condom cheaper and more widely available could also help, Piot said.

"Women like it, use it and often men don't even notice it," he said. "It increases the options for women to protect themselves."
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