HIV / Aids

Some Facts about AIDS -

Global Statistics:

  • Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) has killed more than 25 million people since it was first recognised in 1981.
  • UNAIDS figures released in December 2005 revealed that globally there were 3 million AIDS deaths during 2005, 570,000 of which were children.
  • Around 5 million people have been newly infected with AIDS in 2005.
  • The total number of people infected worldwide has risen from 37.5 million in 2004 to 40.3 million in 2005 - the highest ever level.
  • A total of 2.3 million children under 15 years live with the AIDS virus.
  • Two-thirds of all people infected with HIV-AIDS live in Sub-Saharan Africa.
  • 77% of all women with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • In sub-Saharan Africa more than 12 million children under the age of 15 have lost one or both parents to AIDS
  • In 2005, 17.5 million women (43%) were living with HIV - there has been an increase in the proportion of women being affected by the epidemic.
  • In several southern African countries, more than three quarters of all young people (15-24 yrs) living with HIV are women while in sub-Saharan Africa overall, young women between 15 and 24 years old are at least three times more likely to be HIV-positive than young men.

Oceania Statistics:

  • In 2005 an estimated 74,000 adults and children were living with HIV-AIDS in Oceania, up from an estimated 63,000 in 2003.
  • The number of women living with HIV is estimated at 39,000 or 55% of cases (44% in 2003) in Oceania compared with an estimated 46% of all adults globally.
  • Since 1997, HIV diagnoses have increased by about 30% each year in Papua New Guinea; approximately 10,000 HIV cases had been diagnosed by the end of 2004, although the actual number of people living with HIV could five times as high.
  • Information from Papua New Guinea points to a mainly heterosexual epidemic fostered largely by commercial sex and casual sex networks.
  • HIV diagnoses have started to increase in Australia again after a decline of approximately 25% between 1995 and 2000.
  • Injecting drug use accounted for 20% of diagnoses in Indigenous Australian people as compared to 3% of non-Indigenous. One third of Indigenous women diagnosed with HIV had acquired the virus during unsafe injecting drug use.
  • In New Zealand new HIV cases have doubled in recent years, from fewer than 80 in 1999 to 157 in 2004.
  • Sex between men accounted for about half the new diagnoses in New Zealand. Similar to Australia, more than 90% of people with heterosexually-acquired HIV diagnosed in 2004 had been infected abroad.

     Source: AIDS epidemic update: December 2005, http://www.unaids.org/epi/2005/index.asp, accessed 22 March 2006.