While the world’s focus was on the COVID pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the fight against an old foe lost important ground: Last year more than 1.5 million people became infected with HIV, nearly three times the global target, the United Nations reported. Wednesday.
According to UNAIDS, the organization’s program on HIV and AIDS, about 650,000 people will die from AIDS in 2021, roughly one every minute. Progress against the disease has faltered, and global infections have stagnated since 2018.
The toll in 2021 was uneven, as people aged 15 to 24 – and young women in particular – took on a disproportionate share of the burden. The program states that a new infection occurs every two minutes in a teenage girl or young woman.
In sub-Saharan Africa, young people accounted for 31 percent of new infections, and nearly four out of five of them were in girls and young women. In El Salvador, HIV prevalence nearly doubled among men who had sex with men and nearly eightfold among transgender people.
In Asia and the Pacific, new HIV infections were rising where they were falling. And despite the availability of prevention methods, around 160,000 children worldwide became infected.
“These numbers should represent more than just sounding the alarm — it should represent a complete stop,” said Stephen Wallace, an epidemiologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
Dr. Wallace said, in most countries, including the United States, only privileged groups have continued access to HIV prevention and treatment. “Groups that are oppressed in different parts of the world, or are essentially low on the social hierarchy, are not given equal access,” he said.
An estimated 40 million people worldwide are living with HIV. About 10 million of them, including about half of the infected children, do not have access to treatment.
Fortunately, many of those who were already receiving treatment continued to do so into 2021, thanks to innovative HIV programs in some countries. But in the past two years there have been waves of hardship, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, that have hindered HIV prevention and diagnosis.
Millions of girls were out of school as the coronavirus spread, and teen pregnancies and gender-based violence increased. The pandemic sent poverty rates and fuel costs skyrocketing.
The Ukraine war has led to further increases in food prices and disruptions in supply chains.
“When there is an economic crisis, women – especially young women – are more dependent on transactional sex as a source of income,” said University of Pennsylvania economist Harsha Thirumurthy. “It’s not an economic story in particular, but an economic story overall.”
In 2021, debt repayments for low-income countries comprised 171 percent of spending on health care, education and social security combined. Donor countries tightened purse strings over the past decade, according to the report, and HIV funding from countries other than the United States declined by 57 percent.
Low- and middle-income countries will need an estimated $29 billion to tackle HIV by 2025, but will face a shortfall of about $8 billion.
“These figures are about political will,” UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima said in a statement.
“Do we care about empowering and protecting our girls?” He added. Do we want to stop AIDS deaths among children? Do we put saving lives ahead of criminalization? If we do that, we need to get the AIDS response back on track.”
The response in some countries has been colored by the fact that people from marginalized communities are among those most at risk.
In Australia, Canada and the United States, there are more new HIV infections in black people and Indigenous communities than in white people. Men who have sex with men, drug users and sex workers – who account for about 70 percent of global infections – have nearly 30 times the risk of infection than other people in the population.
Effective global policies must take these realities into account; It’s about “more than just giving people condoms and lube,” Dr. Wallace said.
In an ideal world, for example, young women would have uninterrupted access to reproductive health services without stigma or judgment from their families, communities or houses of worship. Dr. Thirumurthy suggested that cash transfer programs may be as necessary as medical devices to slow new infections among girls.
At a meeting in 2016, UN member states set new goals for 2020: fewer than 500,000 new HIV infections annually, fewer than 500,000 AIDS-related deaths annually, and the elimination of HIV-related discrimination. Nations did not meet those goals.
The world is also unlikely to reach another goal: a reduction of 370,000 new infections annually by 2025. The new report estimates that the actual number is likely to be three times higher.
(This story has not been edited by seemayo staff and is published from a rss feed)