UN Says AIDS Crisis Is Getting Worse

This is Phoebe Zimmerman with the VOA Special English Health
Report.

The fifteenth International AIDS
Conference ends Friday in Bangkok, Thailand. There has not been much
good news. In fact, the United Nations AIDS program reported last
week that the crisis is getting worse.

The report said more people than ever, almost five million,
became infected last year with H.I.V. Thirty-eight million are now
infected with the virus that causes AIDS. Almost half are women. And
half are between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four.

Last year almost three million people with AIDS died. The U.N.
says more than twenty million have died since the disease was first
recognized in nineteen-eighty-one.

The report says H.I.V. is spreading fastest in eastern Europe and
Asia. About seven million people in Asia are living with H.I.V. The
disease largely began to spread there among sex workers, homosexual
men and people who inject drugs. But experts say it is now moving
into the general population.

China, Indonesia and Vietnam were noted for the sharpest
increases. India has the highest number of infections of any country
except South Africa. India has more than five million people with
H.I.V.

Seventy percent of H.I.V. infected people in the world live in
southern Africa. Yet that area has only ten percent of the world's
population. An estimated twenty-five million people are infected in
countries south of the Sahara. Three out of four are women. Among
sixteen year olds in southern Africa today, sixty percent might not
reach their sixtieth birthday. After Africa, the U.N. report says
the Caribbean is the area hardest hit.

U.N. officials says infections are also on the rise in the United
States and western Europe. Half of the new infections in the United
States are among African-Americans.

The report blames the increase in western countries largely on
the use of AIDS drugs which suppress the virus. Officials say these
medicines have made some people less concerned about being infected.

Many countries have reduced their rates of H.I.V. infection.
Among them are Brazil, Uganda and Thailand. Also, drug prices have
dropped. And there is more money to fight AIDS. But the U.N. AIDS
report says developing countries are getting less than half the
money they need. It says only one person in five in developing
countries is able to get treatment.

This VOA Special English Health Report was written by Cynthia
Kirk. This is Phoebe Zimmerman.