Bernard J. Durkan
Question:162 Mr. Durkan asked the Minister for Foreign Affairs the extent to which the international community has been successful in its efforts to curtail the spread of AIDS-HIV through the UN AIDS programme. [27824/00]
Vol. 526 No. 6
162 Mr. Durkan asked the Minister for Foreign Affairs the extent to which the international community has been successful in its efforts to curtail the spread of AIDS-HIV through the UN AIDS programme. [27824/00]
The UN millennium summit in September adopted the target that by 2015 UN member states will have "halted and begun to reverse the spread of HIV-AIDS, the scourge of malaria and other major diseases that affect humanity"– paragraph 19, millennium summit declaration.
Already, according to UNAIDS statistics, 18.8 million people around the world have died of AIDS, 3.8 million of them children. Nearly twice that many, 34.3 million, are now living with the HIV virus. The most recent UNAIDS-WHO estimates show that, in 1999 alone, 5.4 million people were newly infected with HIV – four million of those in sub-Saharan Africa alone. Altogether, there are now 16 countries in sub-Saharan Africa in which more than one-tenth of the adult population aged 15-49 is infected with HIV. In seven countries, all in the southern cone of the continent, at least one adult in five is living with the virus.