WHO that at the end of 2006 two million HIV-

In April, it was revealed by the WHO that at the end of 2006 two million HIV-positive people in low- and middle-income countries were accessing antiretroviral treatment. This means that around 28% of those in need of the life-saving drugs were receiving them. The speed of expansion remained too slow to meet the global AIDS treatment targets agreed by the G8 summit.⁸

By June the G8 had revised its universal treatment pledge to give every person in need of HIV treatment access by 2010. Instead, it proposed a new weaker target stating that the G8 would, “over the next few years” aim to ensure access for “approximately five million people”.⁹ The weakening of the original G8 pledge caused anger, as it was felt that a commitment had been broken which had been at the very heart of the fight against AIDS for the past two years.¹⁰ Although it was acknowledged that universal treatment by 2010 was more idealistic than feasible, many people believed that having such a demanding target put pressure on country governments to get as many people as possible into treatment programmes and highlighted the scale and urgency of the task.

In July, it was revealed that new methods of sampling led to a massive reduction in the estimated number of people living with HIV in India. Previous estimates had suggested that there were around 5.7 million people living with HIV in India, giving it the largest HIV caseload in the world. The new figures suggested that the actual total was somewhere between 2 and 3.1 million people - around 60% lower than the original estimate - and placed India third after South Africa and Nigeria for countries with the highest HIV infected populations. The previously inflated HIV numbers for India were due to figures being obtained in areas of particularly high HIV prevalence and taken from samples from surveillance sites visited mainly by pregnant women, injecting drug users and prostitutes.¹¹

“Today we have a far more reliable estimate of the burden of HIV in India,” said the Indian Health Minister, Anbumani Ramadoss. He did however warn of complacency, as “in terms of human lives affected, the numbers are still large, in fact very large.”¹²