- 19 countries have eliminated vertical (mother to child) transmission of HIV and/or syphilis. Also, dual HIV/syphilis rapid diagnostic tests are being rolled out for pregnant women in antenatal care and for key populations.
Infection rates are declining but are they declining fast enough?
Yet many indicators remain off-track to achieve the 2025 and 2030 global targets. While HIV incidence and HIV-related deaths are declining, the rates of decline are not fast enough. There were 1.3 million new HIV infections and 630,000 HIV-related deaths in 2022 - many of them due to late engagement in care and structural barriers to service access.
By the end of 2022, only 13% of people living with chronic hepatitis-B infection had been diagnosed and 3% had received antiviral therapy, while only 36% of people living with hepatitis-C infection had been diagnosed and 20% had received curative treatment. Despite having a vaccine for preventing hepatitis-B, it resulted in an estimated 1.1 million deaths in 2022.
More than 1 million new cases of STIs occur every day
In an exclusive interview given to CNS (Citizen News Service), Dr Meg Doherty, WHO Director of the Department of Global HIV, Hepatitis and Sexually Transmitted Infections Programmes, said: "We have the tools to be on the pathway to reach our 2025 targets and our 2030 goals. For HIV, we have done very well in terms of increasing service coverage, access to testing, treatment and viral load testing. But we are off the mark on our impact targets - the number of people dying from these infections, the number of people getting new infections. Even in countries reaching the 95-95-95 service targets, new cases are occurring among young girls or women in subsaharan Africa. We have to do much more work with key populations- men who have sex with men, transgender persons, people who inject drugs, people in prisons, people who sell sex - because they often get left behind in the response. There needs to be extra political commitment and community involvement to ensure that they have the same approach to having equitable access to testing, access to treatment, access to viral load testing and being virally suppressed."
Why are sexually transmitted infections on the blindspot?
Globally every year 374 million people (183.4 million of them being women) get infected with a range of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) such as trichomoniasis, chlamydia, gonorrhoea or syphilis, even though these infections are treatable, curable and preventable.
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