United Press International - November 28, 2001
John Zarocostas

The increase would bring the total number of people living with the human immodeficiency virus to 40 million, including 2.7 million children and 17.6 million women, the study "AIDS epidemic update 2001," said.

"HIV/AIDS is unequivocally the most devastating disease we have ever faced, and it will get worse before it gets better," said Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, in a statement.

In 2001, 3 million people are expected to die from acquired immune deficiency syndrome, including 2.3 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated 3.4 million new infections this year brings the total living with the virus in that region to 28.1 million.

Dr. Peter Ghys, epidemiologist with UNAIDS, told reporters the HIV epidemic is "still in its early stages in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia."

Indeed, the report said the incidence of HIV is rising faster in Eastern Europe and Central Asia than anywhere else in the world with "an estimated 250,000 new infections in 2001, raising to 1 million the number of people living with HIV."

Ghys said by early November that "75,000 new HIV-positive registered infections" had been reported in Russia, a 15-fold increase in just three years.

He pointed out the figures underestimate by several times of total number of real new infections.

Sharing drug needles and unsafe sex largely are responsible for triggering most of the new cases in the former Soviet Union, the report said and it warned a "huge epidemic may be imminent" if massive prevention efforts are not undertaken.

The report said new evidence of rising HIV infections in industrialized countries in North America, Western Europe and Australia is emerging and attributed the 75,000 new infections in these countries to "unsafe sex, reflected in outbreaks of sexually transmitted infections and widespread injecting drug use."

Ghys said rich countries "need to refocus on prevention."

The report cautioned that wide access to antiretroviral therapy in high income countries "has encouraged misperceptions that there is now a cure for AIDS and that unprotected sex poses a less daunting problem."

Winni Mpayu-Shumbusho, director for HIV/AIDS at WHO, said there is a need for continued preventive efforts, in particular in many poor countries.

She said "over half of the young people (ages 15 to 24) in over a dozen countries from Botswana to Ukraine have never heard of AIDS or how its transmitted."
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