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| health > AIDS > story page |         |
HIV-positive women in Africa now outnumber infected men
November 23, 1999
LONDON (CNN) -- The number of HIV-positive women in Africa has surpassed infected men for the first time, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS announced Tuesday. Worldwide, an estimated 33.6 million people, including 1.2 million children, are carrying the virus that causes AIDS, program officials said. About half of all people who acquire the AIDS virus become infected before they turn 25 and typically die before their 35th birthdays, according to the UNAIDS report. Some 2.2 million people died of AIDS last year, UNAIDS officials said. And more than 16 million people have now died of the disease, which destroys the body's immune system.
The AIDS virus continues to spread at a growing rate, UNAIDS officials said. In 1999 alone, 5.6 million people will have become infected with HIV. The rate of infection in the former Soviet Union is skyrocketing. This year also will see 2.6 million deaths from AIDS, the highest annual global total since the disease began to take hold in the late 1970s, reported UNAIDS officials. Vast majority of HIV victims live in poor countriesNinety-five percent of people with HIV reside in developing countries, a proportion that is likely to grow as infection rates continue to rise in countries where poverty, poor health systems and limited resources fuel the spread of the virus, the officials said. Sub-Saharan Africa continues to be worst-hit, with close to 70 percent of the global total of those with HIV. But the UNAIDS report added that battling HIV rates is still a challenge in industrialized countries of the West, where there is "extremely worrying evidence" that safe sexual practices are declining among gay men. While AIDS deaths in the United States decreased by 42 percent between 1996 and 1997, the figure dropped by only half that between 1997 and 1998. In sub-Saharan Africa, HIV-infected women outnumber infected men by a ratio of more than 6-to-5. For both sexes, life expectancy in southern Africa is expected to drop from age 59 to 45 sometime between 2005 and 2010 because of the AIDS epidemic, according to UNAIDS. Worldwide, the number of infected people continues to grow, especially fueled by an increase in illegal use of injected drugs, the U.N. organization said. 'Every new infection adds to the ripple effect'A total of 33.4 million people were reported last year to be HIV positive. However, UNAIDS officials said this year's increase is even larger than it appears because the 1998 figures in a few heavily populated Latin American and Asian countries were overestimated. "With an epidemic of this scale, every new infection adds to the ripple effect, impacting families, communities, households and increasingly, businesses and economies," said Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS. But people worldwide are "at a turning point" in responding to the epidemic, he said. "Never before have so many heads of state spoken out...(and) more investments are being made by the development agencies of the richer countries." By the turn of the century, the epidemic worldwide will have left behind 11.2 million orphans -- with both parents having died of AIDS -- and many of the children having the disease themselves. The Associated Press contributed to this report. RELATEDS AT  :
HIV Infection and AIDS RELATED STORIES: Women and AIDS: The forgotten epidemic RELATED SITES: CDC - Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention - Treatment
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