About 33 million people in the world are HIV carriers and the only way to fight the disease is to prevent infection and educate the public, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) said Tuesday in a communique.
The 2008 report on the global AIDS epidemic, produced by UNAIDS, was released Tuesday simultaneously in New York, Geneva, Johannesburg and Bangkok.
The numbers of new HIV infections worldwide decreased from 3 million in 2001 to 2.7 million in 2007, and the number of new infections among children fell from 450,000 to 370,000, the report says.
There has also been an increase in the number of patients who received some kind of treatment for the disease, which rose from 1million to 3 million during the same time.
Anti-retroviral therapy for people living with HIV/AIDS helped reduce the number of casualties from 2.2 million in 2006 to 2 million in 2007.
About 22 million of the global total of 33 million people infected with AIDS live in sub-Saharan Africa, followed by some 4.2 million in southern and southwest Asia and 1.7 million in Latin America, UN officials said at a press conference in Mexico City.
Half of those infected are women and 2 million are children.
In 2007, there were 2.7 million new infections worldwide, with an average of 7,400 new cases reported every day. More than 96 percent of the new cases occurred in low- or medium-income countries.
Also in 2007, 370,000 children under the age of 15 got infected with HIV, which meant an increase from 1.6 million in 2001 to 2 million in 2007.
Of them, 90 percent live in sub-Saharan Africa.
Philippe Lamy, Representative of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and World Health Organization (WHO) in Mexico, said the numbers show some improvement and change in the world scene, but added that HIV/AIDS is still a global problem, with those infected often facing discrimination.
Source:Xinhua
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