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For first time in history, half of all people with HIV are getting treatment

Posted on July 20, 2017

Source: Science

For first time in history, half of all people with HIV are getting treatment

"A new update on the global HIV/AIDS epidemic offers “scorecards” for countries that starkly highlight successes in green and failures in red (for an example, see here).

Collectively, the world receives high marks for its HIV/AIDS efforts from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) in Geneva, Switzerland. It notes in Ending AIDS that 19.5 million of the estimated 36.7 million people living with the virus now receive lifesaving antiretroviral (ARV) drugs. This is the first time in history that more than half the infected people are being treated.

But several countries are falling far short of the UNAIDS prescription of what it takes to bring an epidemic to an end, which essentially requires slowing the rate of virus transmission to the point that new infections peter out."

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