Far More HIV-Positive Patients Are Now Receiving Treatment

The 25th International AIDS Conference is running in Munich, Germany between July 22-26. Held every two years, the event brings together the knowledge and experience of not only scientists, health professionals and policy makers, but people living with HIV as well as funders in order to collectively find ways to strengthen policies and programs to combat HIV worldwide, informed by the latest medical advances.

According to the latest data from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), nearly 40 million people were living with HIV in 2023. Since the start of the epidemic four years ago, UNAIDS estimates that around 88.4 million people have been infected with HIV worldwide and an estimated 42.3 million people have died of AIDS. The WHO African region continues to be the most severely affected, with nearly 1 in every 25 adults living with HIV. Saying that, last year it was outside of the sub-Saharan region that the majority of new infections took place, highlighting the progress made in many African countries in tackling the disease. Between 2010 and 2022, the biggest increases in infections were in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa as well as Latin America.

As the following chart based on data from the World Health Organization shows, a growing number of people infected with HIV are being treated worldwide. At the end of 2022, approximately 30 million people had access to antiretroviral treatment, an increase of more than 20 million since 2010. Thanks to advances in HIV therapies, people living with the disease who have access to the right treatment and care can now have a life expectancy similar to an HIV-negative person. The effectiveness of these treatments allows patients with an undetectable viral load not to transmit the virus and there is now also a treatment (pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP) that prevents HIV-negative people from becoming infected with the AIDS virus.