ART and AIDS

By The Economist online

A timeline of the fight against HIV and AIDS

THE latest report from UNAIDS, the United Nations agency whose job it is to combat AIDS, has been released ahead of the International AIDS Society (IAS) meeting in Washington, DC, which starts on July 29th. Though the situation is still bad, it is improving. As the chart shows, the number of people dying because of AIDS has been falling since 2005, when it was 2.3m a year. It now stands at 1.7m a year. The main reason for this is the rapidly increasing number of people on life-saving antiretroviral therapy drugs (ART)—now more than 8m in poorer parts of the world, where most AIDS-related deaths happen. Recent research shows that these drugs can also stop the spread of the virus from person to person, and a big topic of discussion at the IAS meeting will be how best to deploy them to do just that.