U.N. warns AIDS to rapidly increase if countries drop guard
Pastor Dale Morgan
U.N. warns AIDS to rapidly increase if countries drop guard*
By Michael Kahn
Reuters
Tuesday, November 20, 2007; 11:23 AM
LONDON (Reuters) - The world risks a resurgence of the AIDS epidemic if
countries let their guard down, United Nations officials cautioned on
Tuesday.
Lower estimates of how many people are infected with the virus, and more
effective treatments, are causing countries to relax their vigilance,
they said.
Earlier, the U.N. AIDS agency slashed its estimates of how many people
are infected from nearly 40 million to 33 million, mainly due to revised
figures for India. It said better methods of collecting data showed it
is not quite a common as feared..
But officials said evidence also showed the epidemic was creeping back
in countries that have become less careful, mainly industrialised
nations where many people with AIDS have access to drugs that can extend
their lives.
"We are seeing a return of the epidemic," Paul De Lay of UNAIDS told
reporters. "We are seeing that in the U.S., we are seeing that in the
UK, we are seeing that in Germany and we are seeing that in the
developing world also."
Each day there are more than 6,800 new HIV infections and 5,700
AIDS-related deaths, ensuring that the disease will pose a major health
concern for years, UNAIDS said.
"The sheer scale of the epidemic compared to other diseases is so much
more vast," De Lay said. "The epidemic is just waiting to come back if
programs are reduced."
The U.N. agency said the single biggest reason for this reduction was a
push to better assess India's HIV epidemic. After originally estimating
some 5.7 million people were infected in India, the U.N. more than
halved that estimate, to 2.5 million, in July.
Experts and AIDS advocacy groups have long criticized the agency's
numbers as too high, and some said there was no way to tell if the new
report was any better without universal testing.
Kevin De Cock, director of the World Health Organization's Department of
HIV/AIDS said the implications for dealing with the disease were the
same despite the lower estimates.
"This remains the leading infectious disease challenge to public health
even if some of these figures are adjusted," he told reporters in a
telephone briefing . "We are facing decades of this problem."
(Reporting by Michael Kahn and Maggie Fox; editing by Robert Hart)