XPost: alt.politics.homosexuality, hiv.aids.data, alt.society.liberalism
XPost: alt.atheism
From: Trdell1234@---gmail.com

On Mon, 11 Nov 2013 23:30:02 +0100 (CET), "Nancy Pelosi Facts"
 wrote:

>HIV epidemics are becoming more concentrated in marginalized
>groups such as sex workers, drug users and gay men, and could
>defy global attempts to combat AIDS if attitudes do not change,
>a U.N. expert said.
>
>Michel Kazatchkine, U.N. Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Eastern
>Europe, says he would like to be able to celebrate without
>reservation global progress made in the past decade, but
>stubborn infection rates and alarming growth of outbreaks in
>hard-to-reach populations make that difficult.
>
>The risk, he says, is that as the world turns the tide of the
>global AIDS epidemic, the virus will return to being a disease
>that plagues only certain groups and the political will to
>overcome it may fade.
>
>"If we do not address the roots of the problem, if we do not
>address stigma, discrimination and inappropriate legislation, if
>we don't look at these people from a public health perspective,
>rather than from a delinquent, criminal perspective as we do
>now, then the trend will only go on," he said in an interview.
>
>"Then the AIDS epidemic will become more and more a sum of these
>concentrated epidemics."
>
>Extraordinary progress
>
>Some 35.3 million people worldwide are infected with the human
>immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, but the rising
>number of patients reflects great strides in recent years in
>developing sophisticated HIV tests and combination AIDS drugs
>and getting them to many of those who need them to stay alive.
>
>The annual AIDS death toll is falling, dropping to 1.6 million
>people in 2012, down from a peak of 2.3 million in 2005, and
>there are also steadily declining rates of new HIV infections: a
>third fewer in 2013 than in 2011.
>
>The progress has generated much hope about the possible end of
>AIDS, or a potential world without HIV, or the chance of an AIDS-
>free generation, in our lifetimes.
>
>Kazatchkine, who was due to speak at a City Health Conference in
>the Scottish city of Glasgow on Monday, refers to both the
>progress and the hope as "extraordinary".
>
>"I'm really concerned about the future of the AIDS epidemic,
>especially at a time when we are perhaps a little too optimistic
>because of the huge progress we are making from a technological
>and scientific perspective," he said.
>
>"As we celebrate the extraordinary progress, we should also be
>conscious that we will not stop HIV and AIDS by just having more
>sophisticated drugs and only focusing on the generalized
>epidemic and not focusing enough on the complexities of the
>concentrated epidemics."
>
>The worrisome groups are fairly clearly defined: Injecting drug
>users, who can pass the AIDS virus to each other by sharing
>needles and syringes, prostitutes and sex workers, who are often
>criminalized and have little access to health services, and gay
>and bisexual men - the population in which the HIV epidemic
>started.
>
>A tale of two women
>
>To illustrate how little has changed in the battle against HIV
>among drugs users - particularly in regions such as Eastern
>Europe and central Asia - Kazatchkine tells of two women.
>
>The first is Andrée, a drug user he met in Paris in 1986 who had
>no hope of effective HIV treatment, since there was none yet
>developed, and who ultimately died a lonely death. The second
>was Larissa from Yekaterinburg in Russia, a drug addict
>repeatedly arrested and locked up, deprived of medications for
>years and at one time sentenced to five years in a labor camp.
>
>"These stories are remarkably similar," he said. "But Larissa's
>is not from 1986, it's from this year. Some 25 years passed
>between my meeting these two women, but their predicament was
>depressingly, tragically, the same."
>
>Among gay men, Kazatchkine said, the situation is little better.
>In poor and middle-income countries, men who have sex with men
>(MSM) and female sex workers are 19 and 13 times more likely to
>have HIV, respectively, than the rest of the population.
>
>Even in wealthy regions like western Europe and North America,
>HIV rates among gay men - or MSM as Kazatchkine refers to them -
>stubbornly refuse to shift.
>
>HIV among gay men
>
>"In MSM populations, there is no sign it has decreased," he
>said. "It has either been a stable number of new infections
>every year for 10 years, or it is an increasing trend. And this,
>in western Europe at least, is in the context of basically free
>and easy access to therapy and services."
>
>Elsewhere, in China, for example, gay men alone account for more
>than 33 percent of new HIV infections, and projections indicate
>that gay men may account for half or more of all new infections
>in Asia by 2020.
>
>Kazatchkine admits that he is as frustrated and worried now,
>faced with these smaller but relentless HIV epidemics, as he was
>more than a decade ago when the vast generalized HIV and AIDS
>outbreak in Africa looked too overwhelming to begin to tackle.
>
>"We are a bit in disarray. We don't know quite what it is that
>we should do. Here we are, we have all the technology, we have
>extraordinary scientific progress, and we just cannot translate
>that into making a difference in these populations."
>
>Yet if nothing changes, the AIDS virus may never be beaten.
>
>Kazatchkine called for a "shift in the collective mindset" to
>put equity and human rights at the center of the battle against
>HIV in these groups: "If we do not deliver the right response,
>we will fail to deliver an end to AIDS," he said.
>
>http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/11/04/could-concentrated-hiv-
>epidemics-make-aids-unbeatable/?intcmp=obnetwork


Without a vaccine I don't see HIV going away ever.  The fastest
growing rates are in Africa.

http://aids.gov/hiv-aids-basics/hiv-aids-101/statistics/

http://www.avert.org/usa-hiv-aids-statistics.htm

HIV top 10 States


http://theboxhouston.com/1599631/the-10-states-with-the-highest-
idshiv-rate-is-your-state-on-the-list/


--
All it takes for bad people to prevail, is for good people to do nothing

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)