East and southern Africa still have the highest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world. The region is home to 6.2% of the world’s population but has over half of the global HIV-positive population, according to Avert. While 790,000 new infections in 2016 are still worryingly high, it is an improvement from the previous decade: HIV infections have decreased by 24% among adults and 56% among children.
Now, however, a new generation finds themselves as vulnerable to the disease as they may have been in the early years of the pandemic. Health authorities are sounding the alarm with a new set of statistics: the high number of new infections among teenagers. The high rate of infections among young people threatens to undercut the very-recent gains made. [...]
Part of that statistic is due to the children born HIV-positive who have grown up, but their medication regimes have failed to keep up. Many of these deaths, however, are due to new infections among a generation who may not have experienced aggressive public information campaigning. [...]
HIV/AIDS, however, has always been an opportunistic illness. Not only does it thrive in a weakened immune system, it attacks the most vulnerable in society. Women remain the most affected by the disease, accounting for more than half of the HIV-positive population. Yong women are most vulnerable: for every five adolescent boys infected with HIV, there are seven girls, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Unicef.
No comments:
Post a Comment