WORLD AIDS DAY: 10 facts about HIV/AIDS in 2015

Despite major advances, HIV/AIDS remains one of the world's most significant public health challenges, particularly in low and middle income countries, with new diagnoses every year and young women in sub-Saharan Africa seen as being particularly at risk.

World AIDS Day on December 1 is used to unite people in the fight against HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus first identified in 1984, to show their support for people living with HIV and commemorate those who have died. The member countries of the United Nations agreed in September in a new set of global goals to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030.

Here are some facts about AIDS in 2015 with data from the World Health Organisation, the United Nations children's agency UNICEF, and UNAIDS:

1. Globally about 36.9 million people are living with HIV including 2.6 million children

2. An estimated two million were infected in 2014

3. An estimated 34 million people have died from HIV or AIDS, including 1.2 million in 2014

4. The number of adolescent deaths from AIDS has tripled over the last 15 years

5. AIDS is the number one cause of death among adolescents in Africa and the second among adolescents globally

6. In sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest prevalence, girls account for seven in 10 new infections among those aged 15-19

7. At start of 2015, 15 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy compared to one million in 2001

8. Despite widespread availability of HIV testing, only an estimated 51% of people with HIV know their status

9. The global response to HIV has averted 30 million new HIV infections and nearly 8 million deaths since 2000

10. In 2015, Cuba was the first country declared to have eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV

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COMPARING Spread of AIDS and EBOLA in Africa....'Ebola is AIDS on Steroids'..

Just weeks after Sierra Leone discharged its last patient, a new study reflects on the lessons learnt from the recent
outbreak of Ebola, comparing it with that of AIDS in Africa in the early 1980s. The authors conclude that both Ebola and
AIDS spread rapidly due to the slow international response and the failure of various public-health systems to deal with
the root causes of the epidemics.

"For AIDS, initially it was more important to place blame and stigmatise potential sources of the disease than it was to
work towards knowledge mobilisation and prevention activities. For Ebola, the magnitude of the problem was
underestimated and the severity of the outbreak largely ignored."

Alan Whiteside and Nicholas Zebryk in the Canadian Journal of African Studies name fear and stigma as major factors in
allowing disease to spread: "[They] threaten the ability to identify cases, provide care, and bring the epidemic under
control." In the case of the AIDS epidemic, public fears of both the disease and those infected by it reduced once public
understanding of the illness increased. Ebola's much more infectious nature may always lead to higher levels of fear, but
"demonising the epidemic and its victims will not help."

Both Ebola and AIDS, in their view, are diseases that mainly take hold in countries with inadequate health-care systems
or where people -- including gay men in Africa -- cannot access care. The 'virtually non-existent' health systems in
Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea made monitoring disease difficult, and increased the likelihood of future outbreaks.
Worse, their conflict-damaged infrastructure simply could not respond -- and what responses were made were based on
fear, not science, a pattern seen in the early days of AIDS.

With the current outbreak of Ebola on the wane, and decades of science behind HIV/AIDS, the authors admit that the two
diseases pose different challenges: "With Ebola, the major challenge is infection control. With AIDS … it is to be able to
cover the long-term financial costs of treatment."

"In many ways, Ebola can be described as 'AIDS on steroids', although in the long run it may be more easily controlled.,"
the authors conclude.

Story credit: sciencedaily.com

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