According to the latest health news, new HIV infections and deaths relating to HIV have fallen over the last five years. Deaths from HIV have fallen by over 10% since 1996.

This latest news was revealed as a result of figures from Joint UN Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAids) and the World Health Organization. They say that right now, somewhere in the region of 33.4 million are carriers of HIV. This is a slight increase on the 2007 figures, where 33 million people were carriers of HIV. However, far from being a negative that is in fact good news because it means that far fewer people are dying as a result of HIV.

This also reveals that fewer people are being infected by HIV, showing that the disease is being contained and awareness of the disease is spreading. The World Health Organization and UNAids believes that the allocation of drugs has played a major role in the containment of the disease, saving millions of lives across the world.

They have estimated that 2.9 million have been saved as a result of the drugs to combat HIV since 1996. New cases of HIV have also been reduced in the past eight years, by as much as 17%.

HIV is still one of the major health issues throughout the world however, as approximately 60 million have contracted the disease since the epidemic began, and around 25 million of those people have lost their lives.

The World Health Organization’s director general, Dr Margaret Chan, stated:

International and national investment in HIV treatment scale-up has yielded concrete and measurable results.

We cannot let this momentum wane. Now is the time to redouble our efforts, and save many more lives.