AIDS 2013: Key Anti-AIDS Goals Are on Track, but Some Lag

The number of HIV-positive people receiving medication to prevent the onset of AIDS has increased fortyfold over the last decade. In advance of World AIDS Day 2013, UNAIDS reports that an estimated 35 million people worldwide are living with the virus. More than 9 million have access to lifesaving drugs. U.S. funding programs deliver more than half of those medications.

New HIV infections among adults and children numbered about 2.3 million in 2012. The number, a key statistic gauging the progress of the epidemic and the success of prevention programs, has lessened by 33 percent since 2001. Progress in controlling new HIV infections among children alone is greater, with the number of such infections down more than 50 percent since 2001.

The data come from an annual survey on the disease released in advance of World AIDS Day, December 1. Data released by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimates that more than 35 million people worldwide are living with HIV. By the end of 2012, some 9.7 million people in low- and middle-income countries had access to the drugs that prevent HIV infection from becoming AIDS, an increase of almost 20 percent in that year alone, UNAIDS reports. The drugs prevent the virus from advancing, but they do not cure the disease.

Between 2002 and 2012, the number of people receiving lifesaving drugs increased fortyfold, UNAIDS calculates. The increase stems from “increased political commitment and smarter investments,” the report finds. Delivery of treatment and prevention efforts to vulnerable populations such as injecting drug users and sex workers remains challenging.

U.S. financial support delivers medications to millions of people living with HIV/AIDS.

The children above are some of the 1.3 million AIDS orphans in Kenya. This group lives in Nyumbani, a village orphans share with an older generation that has lost adult children to the disease.