The UNAIDS annual report found a nearly 20 percent decrease in new HIV infections globally and an almost 20 percent decline in deaths among those infected with HIV from 2004 to 2009.
Sergei Supinsky, AFP / Getty Images
A nurse cares for a terminally ill patient at an HIV/AIDS clinic in Kiev, Ukraine. A new study shows a dramatic drop in the number of new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths worldwide.
"For the first time, we can say that we are breaking the trajectory of the AIDS epidemic. We have halted and begun to reverse the epidemic," UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibe told Reuters on Monday. "Fewer people are becoming infected with HIV and fewer people are dying from AIDS."
A separate study published this week offered another bright spot in the battle against the AIDS epidemic. Men who take an anti-retroviral pill can lower their chances of HIV infection by more than 90 percent when they use the pill as prescribed, according to the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Sidibe told The New York Times the study was "a breakthrough that will accelerate the prevention revolution."
The UNAIDS annual report stated that while progress in the fight against AIDS has been made thanks to an increase in access to life-saving drugs, treatments are still being denied to 10 million people infected with the disease around the world, particularly children and members of marginalized communities.
The gains are "real but still fragile," the report said. Researchers noted that those gains depend on resources that have been hard to come by since the global recession began. "In 2009, for the first time, the funds available for fighting the epidemic were less than in the previous year," Bernhard Schwartlander, chief epidemiologist at UNAIDS, told reporters Monday, according to the Los Angeles Times.
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