Record Numbers Infected With HIV

U.N. Cites Rapid Rise In Asia and E. Europe

BANGKOK, July 6 -- The global AIDS epidemic spread at an alarming pace last year with a record 4.8 million new infections, according to a U.N. report released Tuesday, which expressed concern that the virus is spreading quickly in Eastern Europe and Asia.

Issued in advance of the 15th International AIDS Conference, which opens Sunday in Bangkok, the report said that governments were not doing enough to prevent the spread of AIDS. Only one in five people worldwide have access to prevention programs, it said.

Sub-Saharan Africa continued to have the world's highest incidence of AIDS, the report said. But Eastern Europe and Central Asia are suffering from the fastest rate of growth in HIV infections, U.N. officials said. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.

In Asia, prevention has been inadequate "partly because of stigma and discrimination," the report said. There were success stories in Thailand and Cambodia, where prevention programs deal more openly with high-risk behavior, such as intravenous drug use and prostitution, said the U.N. report, which warned against "complacency."

"What's happening in Asia is determining the global outcome," Peter Piot, executive director of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, said in a telephone interview. "There is a desperate need for leadership, particularly in Asia and in Eastern Europe."

Thirty-eight million people worldwide were estimated to have HIV last year, 3 million more than at the end of 2001, the U.N. report said. It said that comparing the latest estimates with those published in previous years was "misleading" because the new figures had been revised downward based on "improved methodologies."

More than 20 million people with the disease have died since the first AIDS diagnosis in 1981.

The epidemic's spread throughout the world continued to be alarming, with about 9 million new infections since the last two-year reporting period, the report said.

In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, injected drug use is the major reason for new infections. But sub-Saharan Africa, where about 25 million people have HIV, remains the region hardest hit by the epidemic.

Life-prolonging drugs were not reaching enough patients in developing countries, where only about 7 percent of those who need treatment receive it, the U.N. report said.