Statistics

In a little over 25 years HIV/AIDS has swept around the globe leaving no country unaffected. Understanding the progress and true impact of the pandemic requires some familiarity with the relevant statistics at global, continental, national or regional level. This page offers an introduction to HIV and AIDS in numbers. For more information you may wish to consult the UK-based charity Avert http://www.avert.org/statindx.htm or UNAIDS http://www.unaids.org/en/.

Global Statistics European Statistics UK Statistics Jersey Statistics


Today there are over 33 million people living with HIV around the world. 25 million men women and children have died since AIDS was discovered in 1981. Every minute of every day 6 people die as a result of HIV/AIDS and a further 10 people are newly infected. Today half of all new infections are contracted by young people under the age of 25.
Sub-Saharan Africa has been hit hardest by the HIV/AIDS pandemic; 22 million of the 33 million people infected worldwide live in sub-Saharan Africa. 12 million African children have lost one or both of their parents to AIDS.


The very diverse ways in which the HIV epidemic has unfolded across the more than 50 countries that make up Europe, make it difficult to present helpful statistics for the continent as a whole. Instead it is now common to divide Europe into ’Western’, ’Central’ and ’Eastern’ regions where comparisons can be more helpfully drawn.


Official figures for HIV in Western Europe are widely believed to be significantly lower than the true number of infections in the region. Although 275,570 cases of HIV were reported in Western European countries up to the end of 2006, this figure does not accurately reflect the very large numbers of people living with HIV in Spain, France and Italy. UNAIDS believes that there may be an additional 390,000 cases of HIV in these three countries alone.

Since 1999 heterosexual contact has taken over from transmission amongst men who have sex with men as the primary route of HIV infection in all Western European countries except Greece, Germany and the Netherlands. Intravenous drug use continues to play a considerable role in the spread of HIV but the number of infections acquired in this way appears to be steady or declining in most of the region, indicating that the increased number of needle exchange programmes is having a positive effect.

The Western European countries with the highest prevalence of new HIV diagnoses, based on 2006 figures, are Portugal (205 per million) and the UK (149 per million).


HIV has not affected Central Europe in anything like the measure experienced by Western Europe. A total of 1,805 new diagnoses were reported from 15 countries in 2006, with the cumulative number of infections for the whole region standing at 26,922.


Although UNAIDS estimates that 1.5 million people are living with HIV in Eastern Europe, only 503,766 cases had been reported by the end of 2006. Just two countries reported more than 90% of these cases: Russia and Ukraine. Widespread injecting drug use is largely responsible for the spread of the virus in the Eastern region as there continue to be significant barriers to implementing harm reduction programmes. UNAIDS now estimates that more than 1% of the populations of Estonia, Ukraine, Moldova and Russia, are living with HIV.

* Western Europe is defined here as: Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
** Central Europe is defined here as: Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Turkey.
*** Eastern Europe is defined here as: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Republic of Moldova, Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.


By the end of 2006 it is estimated that approximately 73,000 people were living with HIV in the United Kingdom. During 2007 at least a further 6,393 people were newly diagnosed with HIV. It is thought that close to 18,000 people who had been diagnosed as HIV+ have died in the UK since HIV/AIDS was first discovered.

Today most deaths result from late diagnosis. Surveillance data shows that one third of all people living with HIV in the UK have not yet been diagnosed, presenting a significant challenge to increase the uptake of HIV testing. It is estimated that more than 25,000 people in the UK are unaware of their infection and therefore unable to access life-saving treatment.

The number of new HIV diagnoses each year has more than doubled in the last decade. This increase is mainly attributed to heterosexuals who acquired their infection in high prevalence areas such as sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean but who were subsequently diagnosed in the UK.

Prior to 1999 the majority of new infections in the UK were diagnosed in men who have sex with men (MSM) but this has now been overtaken by heterosexual transmission. After a period of decline, the number of diagnoses amongst MSM is rising again and it is this group that continues to be most at risk of acquiring HIV within the United Kingdom.


In her 2006 Official Report, Jersey’s Medical Officer of Health estimated that there were probably a total of 60 people, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, living with HIV Jersey. Since the early 1990s there has been a significant shift in the route of transmission for new cases of HIV:

Route of Transmission	Early 1990s	2001-2005
Men who have sex with men (MSM)	62%	13%
Heterosexual	8%	70%
Intravenous Drug Users (IDUs)	30%	17%

Half of those diagnosed as HIV positive in Jersey were infected either within the island or the rest of the UK. 30% of infections were acquired in Western Europe and 20% in Thailand. New diagnoses of HIV are now running at an average of one a month in the island.

At present detailed statistics about HIV are not available in Jersey, as the approved Unlinked Anonymous Testing programme (UAT) has yet to be implemented. Once UAT is up and running it may take several years to collect enough data for an accurate local prevalence figure to be calculated.

Our Island, Our Health – Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 2006

Statistics

Global Statistics

European Statistics

Western Europe*

Central Europe**

Eastern Europe***

UK Statistics

Jersey Statistics

Statistics