Europe and Central Asia still far from ending HIV transmission, says ECDC
In a progress report published on Friday 15 September, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) estimates that most countries in Europe and Central Asia are still far from achieving the goal of eradicating the AIDS epidemic by 2030.
Image taken under an electron microscope of a human T cell, in blue, attacked by HIV, in yellow, the virus responsible for AIDS. © National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases/NIH via AP
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The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV, UNAIDS, aims to end AIDS as a global health threat by 2030. This implies reducing the number of new HIV cases by 90% by the end of the decade, compared to 2010.
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New HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths have decreased in recent years and continue to fall," Andrea Ammon, a doctor and director of the European Union's health agency, told AFP in an interview. This decline suggests that the measures taken to contain the epidemic "are effective, but not sufficient to achieve the target set for 2030", she says.
95-95-95
The study was conducted between January and March 2022 among the 53 countries of WHO Europe. In this region, some 83% of people living with HIV know their HIV status, 85% of these people are on life-saving antiretroviral therapy and 93% of people on treatment have a suppressed viral load and therefore no longer transmit the virus, quite far behind the so-called "95-95-95" targets which call for all these rates to reach 95% by 2025.
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About one in six people living with AIDS do not know their HIV status, with 45 countries in Europe and Central Asia responding to ECDC data collection forms.
Discrimination
Seven countries have already met the 2025 target of people living with HIV knowing their virological status: Monaco, Kosovo, Iceland, Austria, Serbia, Portugal and the United Kingdom.
In this progress report, ECDC attempted for the first time to quantify the discrimination and stigma experienced by people living with HIV in Europe. Due to the lack of data, however, it is not possible to give an accurate picture of the situation on this subject. "But we can already see that 30% of respondents did not even tell a single family member that they were HIV-positive for fear of repercussions," says Andrea Ammon. "I think that speaks volumes.
»40 years ago, French researchers discovered the AIDS virus
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With AFP)
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