Progress Has Been Made in Fight Against AIDS, but Not Enough, U.N. Report Says

By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG, 03 jun 2008 — The good news on AIDS: Nearly a million people began life-prolonging drug treatment in developing countries last year. The bad news: 2.5 million people were newly infected with H.I.V.
As new infections continue to far outstrip efforts to treat the sick, the United Nations released a progress report on Monday that highlighted both the notable gains in combating the AIDS epidemic and the daunting scale of what remains to be done.
Unaids and the World Health Organization, two United Nations agencies, had initially set a 2005 deadline for getting three million people in developing countries onto treatment regimens, but that goal was not achieved until last year. In 2007 alone, the number of people receiving antiretroviral therapy rose by 54 percent. Still, that is less than a third of those believed to need the treatment.
There was also significant headway in providing antiretroviral treatments to help prevent women from infecting their babies with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, during pregnancy and childbirth. About a third of H.I.V.-positive pregnant women got the treatments last year, compared with 10 percent in 2004, with the greatest gains in West and Central Africa, the report found.
“It demonstrates our efforts have started to bear fruit,” Patricia Doughty, a program officer at Unicef, said in a telephone briefing.
But even as health systems geared up to prevent mothers from passing on the disease to their children, the needs of the mothers themselves were neglected. Only 12 percent of H.I.V.-positive pregnant women were assessed for whether they needed treatment themselves. When mothers die of AIDS and their children are orphaned, the opportunities and even survival of the babies who were saved from infection are undermined.
The statistics were laid out in “Towards Universal Access: Scaling up Priority H.I.V./AIDS Interventions in the Health Sector,” a collaboration of Unaids, the World Health Organization and Unicef. It is the annual report that documents the provision of prevention, care and treatment services for H.I.V. and AIDS.
More than a year after clinical trials in Africa found that male circumcision reduced the risk of heterosexual men contracting H.I.V. by about 60 percent, “many high burden countries are exploring how and whether to scale up male circumcision programs,” the report said.
Experts estimate that male circumcision, if widely applied in Africa, could avert two million infections and prevent 300,000 deaths over the next decade.
Dr. Kevin M. De Cock, who heads the World Health Organization’s H.I.V./AIDS department, said performing circumcisions on a large scale was no simple task for overstretched health care systems in southern African countries, where the approach was most needed. He acknowledged that adoption of the strategy had been “relatively slow.”
“There has been progress, but it would be nice to see it faster,” he said.