How many people are living with HIV in the UK and worldwide?
The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the UK's Health Protection Agency released their annual figures for World AIDS Day in 2011. They said that at the end of 2010 there were 34 million people living with HIV, up 17% from 2001. In 2010 there were 2.7 million new infections and 1.8 million HIV-related deaths. However, world annual new HIV infections fell 21% between 1997 and 2010 overall.
In the UK, it was estimated that 91,500 people had HIV at the end of 2010, of whom over a quarter (24%) did not know they had HIV. During 2010, there were 6,660 new diagnoses of HIV in the UK, a slight increase on the previous year.
Around 70,000 people were receiving HIV treatment and care that year. Of that group, 44% were gay men and 51% had been infected though heterosexual sex. Almost two thirds of those infected heterosexually are black African people.
Needle exchange programmes have been very effective, and new diagnoses of HIV infection acquired through injecting drug use (160 in 2010) have remained low. It is also possible for the virus to be passed from mother to baby during pregnancy but improvements to antenatal HIV testing and treatments make this increasingly rare.
The number of people living with HIV aged over 50 has been increasing, from one in 10 in 1999 to one in five in 2010.
