• Aids, 38 million people worldwide live with the HIV virus
  • Six thousand Italians with advanced AIDS, but they did not know it

Share

08 July 2020Well 24 countries, where 8.3 million people are treated with HIV "have extremely low stocks or interruptions in the supply of antiretroviral medicines". Denouncing the "strong negative impact of the Covid pandemic" on the fight against AIDS, are the results of a survey by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the six-month conference of the International AIDS Society. 

Drug
shortages in 73 countries The inability of suppliers to deliver drugs on time, the stop of transport and limited access to health services are among the causes of the shortage of these drugs linked to the pandemic and reported in total, at the level more less serious, from 73 countries.

The concern of the WHO
"Deeply worrying" numbers according to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, if you consider that a six-month interruption in access to antiretrovirals could lead to a doubling of AIDS deaths in sub-Saharan Africa in the alone 2020. "We cannot allow the Covid-19 pandemic to undo the hard-earned gains in the global response to this disease," added Ghebreyesus.

The numbers of HIV and little progress
Concern that adds up to the stalemate of the progress achieved globally in recent years. According to the latest data, published in the latest WHO and Unaids report, new HIV infections decreased by 39% between 2000 and 2019 and deaths dropped by 51%, while about 15 million lives were saved thanks antiretroviral therapy. However, global goals are slowing down. In the past two years, there has been only a modest reduction in HIV-related deaths, from 730,000 in 2018 to 690,000 in 2019. In addition, there were 1.7 million new infections, without major changes compared to the previous year.