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AFP
Paris
COVID-19 could cause an additional half a million AIDS deaths if treatment is disrupted long term, the United Nations said on Monday in a warning that the pandemic was jeopardising years of progress against HIV.
At the start of a week of virtual International AIDS Conferences, the UN said the world was already way off course in its plan to end the public health threat even before COVID-19.
Although AIDS-related deaths have fallen by 60 percent since the peak of the HIV epidemic in 2004, in 2019 around 690,000 still died from the illness. Around 1.7 million people were infected last year, and there are now close to 40 million living with HIV worldwide.
The UN’s annual report said that the 2020 target of reducing AIDS-related deaths to fewer than 500,000, and new HIV infections to under 500,000 will now be missed. Millions of people had died in recent decades despite the existence of effective treatments, it said, calling on the world to learn lessons from the AIDS epidemic in its COVID-19 response.
“Like the HIV epidemic before it, the COVID-19 pandemic is exposing our world’s fragilities -- including persistent economic and social inequalities and woefully inadequate investments in public health,” said UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
Key populations at high-risk of HIV/AIDS are being put in further danger as lockdowns leaves them “even more vulnerable than usual”, the report said.
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07/07/2020
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