HIV cases pass record 40 million mark

NEW DELHI, Monday (AFP) Progress has been made in tackling HIV infection in key African countries, but five million people were infected across the world in 2005 taking the total beyond a record 40 million, a UN report said Monday.

The grim AIDS epidemic claimed 3.1 million lives during the year, more than half a million of them children, the report said.

"The total number of people living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) reached its highest level, an estimated 40.3 million" up from 37.5 million in 2003, said the AIDS Epidemic Update 2005, released in New Delhi.

The report that came ahead of World AIDS day on December 1 noted that "the overall number of people living with HIV continued to increase in all regions of the world except the Carribean."

"There were an additional five million new infections in 2005," it said.

The survey warned that growing epidemics were underway in eastern Europe, Central Asia and east Asia and that the spread of HIV/AIDS was intensifying in southern Africa.

Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 64 percent of the new infections taking the number cases there to an estimated 25.8 million.

"HIV stigma and the resulting actual or feared discrimination have proven to be perhaps the most difficult obstacles to effective HIV prevention," the report said, and these factors "created an ideal climate" for the spread of the epidemic. Only "one in 10 Africans and one in seven Asians in need of anti-retrovirals were receiving it in mid-2005."