AIDS - medication access improves

The global anti-poverty group ONE warned on Monday that there was no end in sight to AIDS worldwide despite better access to antiretroviral medications for patients.

ONE, an advocacy group founded a decade ago by personalities such as the musician Bono, said the world had reached the "tipping point" towards overcoming the pandemic.

"But, not all countries are there yet, " said Erin Hohlfelder, ONE's director of global health policy. "Gains made can easily stall or unravel."

Medicinal 'cocktail' helps

Over three decades, AIDS has killed up to 40 million people worldwide.

Another 35 million remained alive but with the virus HIV by the end of last year, according to data compiled by the UN's World Health Organization (WHO).

Of the 2.1 million new infections recorded during 2013, 70 percent occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, said the WHO. Some 1.5 million people had died worldwide.

In a hopeful sign, the UN agency UNAIDS said by June this year, some 13.6 million people had access to antiretroviral drugs, compared to just 5 million in 2010,

"Despite the good news, we should not take a victory lap yet," said ONE's Hohlfelder.

The human immunodeficiency disease known by the acronym AIDS/HIV is spread via blood, semen and breast milk.

There is no known cure as such but the infection can be kept at bay for many years by cocktails of medications that contain the virus' spread.

Rising levels in ex-Soviet states

Last week, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control and the WHO warned that HIV infection cases had doubled in Russia and former Soviet states over the past 10 years, particularly among narcotics users who injected themselves.

Last year more than 105,000 new infections were recorded in the former Soviet states in eastern Europe and Central Asia, compared to about 50,000 in 2004.

In the EU and eastern Europe, sex between gay and bisexual men was still the main mode of HIV transmission, accounting for 42 percent of new cases in the region.

WHO urges China to react

On Monday, the WHO also called for urgent remedial action in China, saying nearly half a million people in the People's Republic were living with the disease.

Hundreds of thousands more were thought to be undiagnosed, said the WHO.

Its representative in China, Bernhard Schwartlaender said China needed to do "much more" to prevent infection.

"Perhaps mostly importantly, we must eliminate stigma and discrimination towards people living with HIV," he said.

Some medics in China turned patients away because they disapproved of their sexual orientation, Schwartlaender said. "It has to stop."

ipj/jm (AFP, Reuters, dpa)