Aids has claimed 20 million
2004-07-06 10:25
Special Report
Aids has now killed 25m people around the world, but the number of new infections is slowing sharply, the UN says.
Paris - Aids has claimed five million fewer lives in its history than was estimated two years ago but remains an incurable, fast-spreading peril, according to the latest data issued on Tuesday.
The UN agency UNAids said its revised estimate of the death toll from Aids resulted from more accurate statistics, especially those provided by African countries, and from smarter tools to model the global pandemic.
But even though levels of fatalities and infections are lower than previously thought, the disease is still expanding, it cautioned.
Indeed, it noted that around 4.8 million people became infected by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in 2003 - the highest ever recorded in a single year.
The estimates are contained in the "2004 Report on the Global Aids Epidemic," issued ahead of the 15th International Aids Conference, opening in Bangkok on Sunday and running until July 16.
The report estimates that, since Aids was first identified in 1981, "over 20 million" have died.
By the end of 2003, around 37.8 million people, in a range of 34.6-42.3 million worldwide, were living with Aids or HIV.
The figures are a detailed country-by-country estimate that the Geneva-based agency carries out only once every two years.
In its 2002 estimate, UNAids estimated that 25 million had died and 40 million were living with HIV or Aids at the end of 2001. It feared that in the next 20 years, close to 70 million people would die.
In its latest report, UNAids said that its statistical model had been updated by "more accurate data" from countries which reported cases of HIV and Aids, as well as from information that came from household surveys in some countries.
This gives a far more accurate picture of the epidemic than before, especially in Africa, UNAids said.
It is more precise about remote rural areas and for population groups that are most exposed to the virus, such as homosexuals, drug users and prostitutes, who fear revealing their HIV status to the authorities because of stigma.
Fewer infections
Estimates for previous years have been lowered accordingly, UNAids said.
It now put the 2001 estimate of infections at 34.9 million, in a range of 32-39 million, compared with its initial calculation of 40 million.
"This does not mean the Aids epidemic is easing off or being reversed," UNAids warned soberly. "The epidemic continues to expand."
UNAids began to make changes to its statistical model last November, when it issued a scheduled global update with the World Health Organisation (WHO) that for the first time provided a range for the estimates.
It did this even at the risk of creating the impression, for some, that the Aids epidemic was being beaten back.
In some cases, the range is remarkably broad, indicating the enormous task of garnering reliable statistics in developing countries.
In the case of China, for instance, as few as 430 000 people and as many as 1.5 million have HIV. For India, the range is even wider - from 2.2 million to 7.6 million.
- AFP