HIV infects 5 million new victims

LONDON - The HIV-Aids epidemic has infected 36 million people worldwide, including 5.3 million new cases this year, far outstripping even the worst predictions.

The United Nations said yesterday that cases of the HIV virus and Aids were 50 per cent higher than medical experts a decade ago had predicted, despite advances in both treatments and prevention.

"The world clearly underestimated how rampant this epidemic would become," said Dr Peter Piot, executive director of UNAids, the agency that spearheads the global battle against Aids.

The latest figures showed Aids would kill three million people this year, more than in any previous year.

With 25.3 million adults and children estimated to be living with HIV-Aids by the end of the year, subsaharan Africa is by far the worst-hit area of the world.

According to the agency's Aids Epidemic Update, one in three adults in some African countries is HIV-positive.

But Piot said some countries such as Uganda, Gambia and Senegal had fewer HIV infections now than they did 10 years ago, thanks to better prevention.

Rates of infection had stabilised in Kenya, Zimbabwe and some parts of South Africa.

"But let's make clear what it means. It means there are as many people dying from HIV-Aids as there are people becoming infected," Piot said.

Women are hardest hit by the epidemic in Africa because it is more easily transmitted from men to women, but in Russia and Eastern Europe, which have the fastest spread of HIV-Aids in the world, the picture is very different.

"It's mostly due to injecting drug use but increasingly to sexual transmission, both homosexual and heterosexual," said Piot.

Russia had had more new HIV cases this year than all the combined cases in previous years. Infections would jump from an estimated 130,000 at the end of 1999 to 300,000 by the end of this year, Piot said.



"If current trends continue in Eastern Europe, with more than a doubling of new infections in one year's time, then we will soon get to a situation that is not as bad as the worst-affected parts of Africa but it certainly could have a major impact on society in Russia and the former states of the Soviet Union."

Piot described the year 2000 as one of breakthroughs. HIV-Aids is firmly on the political agenda of most countries and has been debated by the UN Security Council.

Major pharmaceutical companies have agreed to sell anti-Aids drugs that are still under patent at reduced prices to poor countries.

But, Piot said, "the top priority remains prevention."

- REUTERS