Africa: Aids Epidemic Still Advancing, New Survey Shows

The AIDS epidemic and the spread of HIV infection are advancing in regions of the world long affected, and regions that saw little of the deadly virus in the first two decades of the epidemic. The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) announced in a November 25 press release that an estimated 40 million people worldwide are infected with HIV. In sub-Saharan Africa, long the world's most severely affected region, as many as one in five adults lives with the disease, according to "AIDS Epidemic Update 2003," an authoritative global census of the disease published by UNAIDS each year prior to World AIDS Day December 1. More than 3 million new infections and 2.3 million AIDS deaths occurred in Africa alone in 2003.