AIDS to Kill 70 Million People in Next 20 Years, UN Says

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, July 03, 2002

AIDS to Kill 70 Million People in Next 20 Years, UN Says

The United Nations warned Tuesday that AIDS epidemic will kill 70 million people over the next 20 years unless rich nations step up their efforts to curb the spread of the pandemic.

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The United Nations warned Tuesday that AIDS epidemic will kill 70 million people over the next 20 years unless rich nations step up their efforts to curb the spread of the pandemic.

In the latest report issued here on the sideline of the annual high-level meeting of the U.N. Economic and Social Council, UNAIDS,the agency that coordinates U.N. anti-AIDS programs, said that thekilling epidemic is still in its early stages.

More than 40 million people worldwide have AIDS or are infectedwith HIV, the virus that causes the disease, up from 34 million two years ago, and infection rates are climbing, the report said.

AIDS killed a record 3 million people last year -- 2.2 million in Africa alone -- and HIV infected another 5 million worldwide. The disease, which has killed 20 million since its discovery in 1981, has so far created 14 million orphans. Three million of the 40 million people now infected are children under 15 years of age.

Although the disease has drifted from the public eye in developed countries after awareness campaigns in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic is wreaking havoc in sub-Saharan Africa, where 28.5 million people have HIV or AIDS -- more than 70 percent of those infected worldwide.

Nine percent of adults between the ages of 15 to 49 in sub-Saharan Africa are now infected, the report said, up from 8.6 percent at the end of 1999.

The disease is also spreading quickly in East Asia and Eastern Europe, where the total of infected people has roughly doubled.

The world must spend 7 billion U.S. dollars to 10 billion dollars a year by 2005 to tackle AIDS, under targets set last yearat the U.N. General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS in New York.

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