World AIDS day: With Resilience as theme, aim to reduce HIV infection under spotlight

The world has made considerable strides in fighting HIV
since the late 1990s, but it still remains a major global public health
concern. And HIV patients are facing additional threat during the COVID-19 pandemic, as both are immune system-linked diseases.

For World AIDS Day 2020, the theme of the United States
Government (USG) is: Resilience and Effect. Via the President’s Emergency Plan
for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the USG ‘has saved more than 18 million lives,
avoided millions of HIV infections, and changed the HIV/AIDS epidemic from
crisis to control in more than 50 nations.’

With the pandemic in full swing, in countries that have a
leaky health system in place, HIV prevention, monitoring, treatment and care
systems have all been hit and disrupted. Let’s find out some of the main facts
on December 1:

-Up to now, HIV has claimed almost 33 million lives. However,
HIV infection has become a manageable chronic health condition with growing
access to successful HIV prevention, diagnosis, treatment and care.

-An estimated 38 million people were living with HIV at the
end of 2019.

-In 2019, 690,000 individuals died from HIV-related causes
due to deficiencies in HIV services and 1.7 million people were newly infected.

-In 2019, lifelong antiretroviral treatment (ART) was received by
68% of adults and 53% of children living with HIV worldwide (ART). A
significant majority of pregnant and breastfeeding women living with HIV have
earned ART (85 percent).

-At the end of 2019, 25.4 million people were accessing
antiretroviral therapy.

-New HIV infections dropped by 39 percent between 2000 and
2019, and deaths linked to HIV fell by 51 percent, with 15.3 million lives
saved due to ART.

-Primary demographic groups and their sexual partners
accounted for more than 60 percent of all new HIV infections (an estimated 62
percent) in 2019 among the 15-49 age group.

-Men who have sex with men include key groups who are at
heightened HIV risk; people who inject drugs; people in jails and other closed
settings; sex workers and their clients; and transgender people.

-These groups accounted for over 95% of new HIV infections in
Eastern European and Central Asia, Asia and the Pacific, Western and Central
Europe and North America and the Middle East and North Africa.

-Over two-thirds of all people
living with HIV live in the WHO African Region (25.7 million).