A county Ad Hoc Task Force recently recommended increasing awareness about the disease, preventing new infections, using policies to reduce the infection rate to zero, using data to improve outcomes, and studying how certain communities are disproportionately affected by HIV and AIDS.
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In 2015, 1.8 million new HIV infections, some 75 percent, were in sub-Saharan Africa, followed by 8.5 percent in south Asia.
The study is based on findings from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study and explored the numbers of new infections, people living with HIV, deaths from HIV infection and people accessing treatment in 195 countries and territories from 2005 to 2015.
Today, there are some 38.8 million people living with the AIDS-causing virus, a steady increase from 28 million in 2000 thanks to the advent in 1996 of life-prolonging antiretroviral therapy (ART).
Deaths from HIV/AIDS fell to 1.2 million in 2015 from 1.8 million in 2005.
HIV remains stubbornly high among men who have intercourse with men, sex workers, people who use drugs, and transgender women.
Still, most countries remain well short of the United Nations’ target for 81 percent of people with HIV to be getting antiretroviral therapy by 2020. Though the number of new HIV infections has decreased since a peak of 3.3 million in 1997, it has been relatively stable at about 2.5 million a year for the past decade. “Therefore, a massive scale-up of efforts from governments and worldwide agencies will be required to meet the estimated $36 billion needed every year to realise the goal of ending AIDS by 2030, along with better detection and treatment programmes and improving the affordability of antiretroviral drugs”, says the Director of IHME, Professor Christopher Murray.
Officials say the decline comes as Aids services across the world need to be scaled up rapidly in efforts to meet globally-agreed fast track ways of stopping new infections.
It says that in southern Africa, more than one percent of the populations of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland were becoming infected with HIV.
In Europe, the highest rate of new infections was in Russian Federation and Ukraine.
Although global HIV mortality has been declining at 5.5% a year since the mid-2000s, progress has been mixed between regions and countries (figure 1C).
This has been communicated through taglines such as “Stronger together”, alongside stark facts about how many people contract, live and die from the condition every year, with the aim of conveying the “social and personal impact of HIV”, says the consultancy. They say, “The GBD estimates of HIV incidence are significantly lower (two to ten times) than the reported number of newly diagnosed HIV cases for most countries in North America, Europe, central Asia, and Australia (table)”.
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“Are we going to see the end of AIDS by 2030?”
