International health officials even set a tentative date for the planned demise of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
“If we accelerate all HIV scale-up [increased efforts to fight the virus] by 2020, we will be on track to end the epidemic by 2030,” Michel Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, said in an agency news release. “If not, we risk significantly increasing the time it would take — adding a decade, if not more.”
At the end of 2013, an estimated 35 million people worldwide were living with HIV, according to the UNAIDS report, which was released Wednesday.
However, the trend in recent years is promising. In the last three years, new HIV infections have dropped 13 percent, and the 2.1 million new HIV infections reported last year are the fewest since the turn of the century.
New HIV infections among children fell by 58 percent since 2001, and are below 200,000 for the first time in the 21 most affected countries in Africa.
The largest decline in new infections was in the Caribbean — 40 percent since 2005, the researchers noted. But new infections did increase 8 percent in western Europe and North America, 7 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and 5 percent in eastern Europe and central Asia since 2005.
The news on AIDS-related deaths worldwide was also heartening, with statistics showing a 35 percent decline after the number of deaths peaked in 2005. AIDS-related deaths did increase by 66 percent in the Middle East and North Africa. The only other regions where AIDS-related deaths are rising are eastern Europe and central Asia, where the death toll increased 5 percent between 2005 and 2013. Tuberculosis remains the leading cause of death among people with HIV.