Plagues, Pestilences and Diseases
Complacency fuels new AIDS surge in West: UN
December 1, 2010 - 4:09PM
Complacency among young people is causing a new surge of the AIDS
epidemic in the United States and European nations like Britain and
Germany, a top UN expert said ahead of World AIDS Day on Wednesday.
The worrying sexual behavior of young adults, particularly men, in rich
nations and a surge of the spread of AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central
Asia linked to drug use, officials said, has tainted positive signs
such as dramatic cut in the number of infections passed from mothers to
their newborn babies.
Agencies including the UN's HIV/AIDS program UNAIDS have cautiously
highlighted a fall in the number of global infections in figures
released ahead of World AIDS Day on Wednesday.
But Paul De Lay, deputy executive director of UNAIDS, said: "There seem
to be secondary and tertiary waves of the epidemic, particularly the
sexually transmitted side.
"You have a young people who don't know enough about AIDS, there is
less of a fear factor about it."
He said it was a particular problem in Britain, Germany and the United
States. Without giving specific figures, he said infection rates among
young people are three times what they were in the early 2000s.
"We find that every five to seven years we need to go through a new
re-energized education campaign. We are doing that in the UK and
Germany. Here in the US we have had a huge resurgence of sexually
transmitted AIDS."
According to the UNAIDS annual report released last week there were an
estimated 54,000 new infections in the United States last year and
3,900 in Germany. There are an estimated 1.2 million AIDS sufferers in
the United States, 85,000 in Britain and 67,000 in Germany.
In Eastern Europe and Central Asia "there has been been an explosion of
young people who are experimenting with injected drugs," according to
the UN expert.
This is "ripe" for spreading HIV/AIDS and pregnant addicts pass on the
infection to their children extending "an ongoing transmission cycle,"
said De Lay.
Russia and Ukraine together account for almost 90 percent of new
HIV/AIDS infections in recent years, said the UNAIDS report. Ukraine
now has the highest adult AIDS rate in Europe and Central Asia.
UNAIDS said "there is strong evidence of resurgent HIV epidemics among
men who have sex with men" in North America and Western Europe, where
there are now an estimated total of 2.7 million sufferers, up 30
percent since 2001.
The 3,160 new HIV diagnoses among men who have sex with men in Britain
in 2007 were the most ever reported. In the United States, new HIV
infections attributed to unprotected sex between men increased by more
than 50 percent from 1991-1993 to 2003-2006.
Around the world there were an estimated 2.6 million new infections
last year, down from about 3.3 million at the peak of the AIDS epidemic
in 1999, according to De Lay.
"It is a slow, steady decrease," said De Lay, who predicted that at the
current rate it would take about 50 years to conquer Acquired Immune
Deficiency Syndrome.
The 370,00 babies a year born with AIDS is down from 500,000 a year at
the start of the decade and a new UN report said it would be possible
to eradicate mother-to-baby transmission of AIDS by 2015.
Virtually no babies are born with AIDS in Europe and North America now
as wealthier countries launched aggressive screening and prevention
programs in the the 1990s.
But in Africa, 1,000 babies a day are still infected with HIV/AIDS
through mother-to-child transmission.
Anthony Lake, executive director of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF)
called the figure "outrageous" and demanded greater efforts for "the
hardest hit communities."
But, highlighting the greater use of anti-viral drugs and other
treatments, World Health Organisation director general Margaret Chan
said "we have strong evidence that elimination of mother-to-child
transmission is achievable."