HIV infection estimate go down

As per report released by the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WH0)reveals that the number of people around the world living with the virus that causes AIDS is actually nearly seven million fewer than previous estimates, according to the United Nations.

Better information from more countries prompted the groups to revise the 2006 estimate of 39.5 million people living with HIV to 32.7 million, according to a statement from UNAIDS.

The single biggest factor in the reduction, the report said, was the "recent revision of estimates in India after an intensive reassessment of the epidemic in that country."

Other factors include the revision of estimates in Angola, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria and Zimbabwe, the statement said.

But that said so, there is a need to further improve the representativeness of the underlying data and expand disease surveillance systems to better track the sub-epidemics in risk populations within each county added an official.

Current figures show 33.2 million people living with HIV in 2007 -- with 22.5 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa, according to 2007 statistics from the report.

That region also accounts for 1.7 million new HIV infections for 2007 -- of a global total of 2.5 million new infections -- and eight countries in that area account for nearly one third of the 2.1 million AIDS deaths, the report said.

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