AIDS, unknown to world 25 years ago, is threatening global development – UN

Political commitment to fight HIV/AIDS has increased significantly in the past four years, especially in China and India where senior political leaders have been speaking out, but the epidemic still is expanding, Secretary-General Kofi Annan says in a new report to the United Nations General Assembly.

The report tracks implementation of pledges made in the Assembly’s June 2001 Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS, using a broad range of data sources, especially AIDS indicators from 17 countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe.

Despite new political will and “despite encouraging signs that the epidemic is beginning to be contained in a small but growing number of countries, the overall epidemic continues to expand, with much of the world at risk of falling short of the targets set forth in the Declaration,” it says.

The Declaration says everyone should be informed about prevention, mother-to-child transmission must be stopped, treatment should be given to all those infected, the search for a vaccine must be redoubled and the millions of AIDS orphans must be cared for.

Though expanding treatment offers hope, the report says, 11 countries in sub-Saharan Africa are likely to lose more than 10 per cent of their labour force by next year. Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for almost three-quarters of the world’s AIDS deaths last year and the number of deaths in some countries may be matched by a comparable number of new infections, it says.

In the region, “the epidemic has yet to display a natural saturation point,” it says.

Studies by the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) showed that the rate of poverty reduction in one country, Cambodia, may be slowed by as much as 60 per cent on average between 2003 and 2015, it says.

Last December, 7.1 million people in South and South-east Asia were estimated to be living with HIV, as well as 1.7 million people in Latin America, it says.

At the end of last year, meanwhile, Eastern Europe and Central Asia had nine times more people living with HIV than they had had 10 years earlier.

“AIDS-related mortality continues to erode the fragile base of human capital on which sound development depends and threatens to undermine critical social institutions in hard-hit countries,” the report says.