PARIS (AFP) – Sydney’s inner suburbs, once the epicenter of Australia’s AIDS epidemic, are now close to achieving the world’s first U.N. goal of ending the spread of HIV, researchers at the University of New South Wales said today.
The United Nations AIDS Program (UNAIDS) has set the goal of making AIDS no longer a global health threat by the end of 2030, including reducing new HIV infections by 90% compared to 2010.
The number of new HIV infections among gay men in inner Sydney fell by 88 per cent between 2010 and 2022, researchers announced at the International AIDS Society HIV Science Conference in Brisbane, Australia.
“We are very close to the target, about eight years ahead of the 2030 schedule,” Andrew Grulich, an epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales who published the latest study, told AFP.
Only 11 new HIV cases were recorded in Sydney’s inner suburbs last year, Grulich said, “for what was once the heart of Australia’s HIV epidemic, this is a very small number of infections”.
An estimated 20 per cent of the male population in Sydney’s inner city is gay and has the highest number of HIV infections in Sydney.
New HIV cases are also falling rapidly in the UK and several parts of Western Europe, Grulich said.
But Grulich stressed that this did not mean that AIDS was nearly eradicated in Sydney, a city of more than 5.2 million people.
“The eradication of HIV will only happen if a vaccine and a cure are available,” Grulich said.
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2023-07-24 06:05:02
