The AIDS epidemic shows no signs of slowing down, according to the United Nations (UN) statistics released yesterday. Some 5.6 million people were infected with HIV this year, and 2.6 million died of the disease. For the first time, most African women in sub-Saharan Africa are infected than men. And while Africa still has the most cases, the former Soviet Union now has the rate of infection by the fastest rising HIV worldwide.
"The threat of HIV has not declined in all countries," Peter Piot, Executive Director of UNAIDS - the UN Special Programme on AIDS - at a press conference in London yesterday . Especially depressing was the news from Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where the number of people infected with HIV has increased by over a third in 1999 to about 360,000. The increase was faster in the greater Moscow region, where 2,700 infections have been reported in the first nine months of 1999 - three times more than in all previous years. Epidemiologists from UNAIDS and the World Health Organization, the group that published the report, attributed the dramatic increase in Eastern Europe - centered largely in the Russian Federation and Ukraine - . In a surge of drug intravenously
AIDS officials say they are particularly disturbed by the increase in infections among African women, who now account for about 55% of the approximately 23.3 million people with HIV in the sub-Saharan region. Although the reasons for this are not entirely clear, epidemiologists suspect several factors, including greater sensitivity of the female reproductive system for viral transmission. Young African women are particularly vulnerable to infection through forced sex with older men: Recent studies have shown that older African girls aged 15 to 19 are six times more likely to be infected than boys of the same age
the. UNAIDS figures contradict the notion that the epidemic is in decline, said Piot. "There is no room for complacency in any discussion of this epidemic."
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