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

Reuters NewMedia - Wednesday November 25, 1998
Patricia Reaney

Every minute of the year 11 men, women and children contracted the deadly virus that causes AIDS, bringing the worldwide total to 33.4 million people. UNAIDS, the United Nations agency set up to combat the spread of the deadly virus, said more than 95 percent of all HIV infected people now live in the developing world.

"The epidemic has not been overcome anywhere. Virtually every country in the world has seen new infections in 1998 and the epidemic is frankly out of control in many places," UNAIDS said in its annual update of the epidemic. Carol Bellamy, the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), likened the epidemic to a plague that is systematically devastating entire societies.

"Those numbers are framed by one terrible, inescapable fact -- that it is young people up to the age of 24 who are bearing the brunt of the casualties," she told a news conference to launch the report Tuesday.

The research painted a horrifying picture of an epidemic whose death toll rises every year. Nearly six million new cases were reported this year. The developing world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, is the epicenter of AIDS.

Up to a quarter of adults in some African nations are infected with the virus. South Africa alone has one of every seven new infections on the continent. More than 22 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are estimated to have the virus, 6.7 million people in South and Southeast Asia and 1.4 million people in Latin America.

The epidemic started later in Asian and Eastern European countries but is rapidly gaining ground there. In many developing countries AIDS is eating away the economic advances built up over decades.

Dr Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, said the six million new cases and 2.5 million deaths this year represent a collective failure because more was known now about prevention and protection than ever before.

War, famine, political turmoil, lack of medical facilities, shame and secrecy have fuelled the epidemic in many poor nations where the disease is invisible and many people do not even realize they are infected.

But he said Uganda, Thailand, Senegal and Tanzania were examples of success stories where local prevention programs had helped to curb the disease. Antiretroviral drugs that have prolonged the lives of sufferers in the West are unaffordable in most developing countries.

But Piot noted that the therapeutic success has not been accompanied by progress in prevention because the number of new cases has remained stagnant in North America and Western Europe with about 75,000 new cases each year.

And with a vaccine against the HIV virus at least four or five years away, he said prevention was the best way to fight the epidemic.

"I predict in the near future we will see much progress (in vaccines)," he told the news conference, adding that several vaccines were in early trials.
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