The incidence of new HIV infections appears to have stabilised for the first time in the 25-year history of AIDS, although the global pandemic will still have a deep, long-term impact, a new UN report said today. While the world is at last making progress against the disease, thanks to a massive increase in spending, better access to drugs and growing awareness, huge problems remain, the UN agency coordinating the fight against HIV/AIDS warned. In its report, issued on the eve of a UN General Assembly session on the disease, UNAIDS underlined the dangers caused by prevention programmes which it said in many countries were still far off-target and inaccessible to millions of people. ‘‘Overall, the HIV incidence rate (the proportion of people who have become infected with HIV) is believed to have peaked in the late 1990s and to have stabilised subsequently, notwithstanding increasing incidence in several countries’’, UNAIDS said in the latest Report on the Global Aids Epidemic. However, the agency warned that there was no room for complacency. ‘‘We know what needs to be done to stop aids. What we need now is the will to get it done’’, the report said. Aids has killed over 25 million people since it was first recognised in 1981, UNAIDS said, while the HIV virus which precedes the disease infected 65 million people over the same period.
