Steve Quayle News Alerts

July 2, 2002
By Charlene Laino

At a time when many young adults who didn’t live through the first devastating years of the AIDS epidemic are growing complacent about the disease, the United Nations warned Tuesday that the worst is yet to come.

TWENTY-ONE YEARS into the epidemic, AIDS has yet to peak, according to the report, released by UNAIDS in advance of the International AIDS Conference, which begins this weekend in Barcelona.

The virus continues its rampant spread into many of the world’s most populous countries, including India, China and Indonesia, the report said. Meanwhile, a return to unsafe sex among younger adults in Europe and North America is leading to higher rates of infection there.

Already, the number of people infected with HIV in the hardest hit countries of southern Africa is higher than believed possible, the report said. Russia and Eastern Europe are suffering from the greatest increase in new infections.

“We have grossly underestimated how bad this was going to be,” said Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS. “The unprecedented destruction wrought by the epidemic over the past 20 years will multiply several times in the decades to come unless the fight against this disease is dramatically expanded.”

The bottom line: Unless the tide is turned, nearly 70 million people will die of AIDS-related diseases in the next 20 years — more than five times the number of deaths in the first two decades of the epidemic, the report said.

Many of the 40 million people now infected worldwide live in developing nations, where only 4 percent of those who need antiviral drugs have access to them, according to UNAIDS.

SOME ENCOURAGING NEWS
Not all the news is bad: The world is finally waking up to what it will take to bring the epidemic under control, Piot said.

Almost 100 countries now have national AIDS strategies in place, and dozens countries have established national AIDS commissions. Several nations have achieved success in slowing the spread of HIV within their borders, the report said.

In Zambia, for example, the number of new infections is falling among young women. And in Uganda, Africa’s greatest success story in the fight against AIDS, the number of new annual infections decreased from 8.3 percent in 1999 to 5 percent in 2001.

By mounting a strong national response, Poland has successfully curtailed the epidemic among IV drug users and prevented it from gaining a foothold in the wider population, Piot said.

FUNDING STILL FALLS SHORT
But outside of Poland, Eastern Europe has the world’s fastest growing rate of infection, with 250,000 new cases last year.

Overall, funding earmarked for fighting the epidemic has increased six-fold since 1998. But it still falls short: About $3 billion in 2002, compared with the $10 billion a year Piot said is needed to combat AIDS.

The report also downplayed theories that the number of infected people is leveling off in the hardest hit countries of southern Africa.

In Botswana, the country with the world’s highest infection rates, 39 percent of adults are now living with HIV, up from less than 36 percent two years ago. In Zimbabwe, one in four adults was HIV-positive in 1997; now, one in three is infected. And, in a number of southern African countries, up to one half of new mothers could die of AIDS.
Elsewhere, the report said India is now home to more infected people than any other country except South Africa — almost 4 million.

In Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country, infection rates are rising rapidly, following a decade of negligible HIV prevalence. At one Jakarta drug treatment center, for example, four in 10 tested positive.

In a separate report released last week, UNAIDS warned that China is on the brink of an explosive HIV epidemic, with 10 million people projected to be infected by the end of the decade.

YOUNG PEOPLE AT RISK
As AIDS continues its grim march around the planet, young people are at greatest risk for infectionPiot said. Today, approximately half of all new adult infections are among those ages 15 to 24.

Already, 12 million young people are living with HIV, Piot said, and 6,000 more become infected every day. Additionally, 14 million children living today have lost one or both parents to AIDS — a number that continues to grow.

A separate UNICEF survey, also released Tuesday, found that more than half of those ages 15 to 24 don’t know how HIV is spread or how to how to protect themselves.

A RETURN TO UNSAFE SEX
In the United States, Australia and countries of Western Europe, an apparent increase in unsafe sex is triggering higher rates of sexually transmitted infections and in some cases, of HIV disease as well, the report said.

In the United Kingdom, for example, nearly half of the 3,400 new HIV infections diagnosed in 2000 — an increase over previous years — resulted from heterosexual sex, the report said.

In Los Angeles, a syphilis outbreak among homosexuals confirmed warnings that safe sex was on the decline there.

Although AIDS-related deaths in the United States fell a remarkable 42 percent in the mid-90s, the decline has since leveled off, with 15,000 Americans dying of AIDS in 2001, Piot noted.

“Widespread risk taking is eclipsing the safer-sex ethic promoted so effectively for much of the 1980s and 1990s,” he said.

The findings are consistent with that of the U.S. government, which last year reported that HIV is spreading at stunning rates among urban gays who are too young to recall the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic.

The culprit, officials said, appears to be a growing complacency among young American men growing up in an era when potent drug combinations can keep the virus in check.

The need for renewed HIV prevention efforts in the United States will be a major focus of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s presentations at the International AIDS Conference, said Dr. Ronald Valdiserri, deputy director of CDC’s HIV, STD and TB programs.