Aids may kill up to 70 million, says UN

The spread of Aids is only in its infancy and will kill an estimated 70 million people around the world unless rich nations more than triple the money being spent to curb the epidemic, the United Nations warned yesterday.

The latest report from UNAids disclosed that 40 million people have the disease. HIV prevalence is climbing higher than was believed possible in the worst affected countries, and is spreading into new populations in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe. Aids killed a record three million people last year, and another five million became infected with HIV. The disease has killed 20 million since it was discovered in 1981 and has created 14 million orphans.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains the continent worst affected, with 70 per cent of those infected worldwide. Nine per cent of people there aged between 15 and 49 have HIV or Aids. Botswana is the country worst hit in the world, with 39 per cent of the adult population infected, a rise of three per cent from last year. Life expectancy, which was 65 in 1992, has fallen to 42.

In Zimbabwe, one-third of the adults are infected, and in South Africa 17 times as many young people are expected to die in the next 20 years than would have without Aids.

But the problem is also acute elsewhere. The Russian Federation and Eastern Europe has the fastest-growing rate in the world. In China, reported HIV infections rose by nearly 70 per cent in the first six months of 2001. If only one per cent of the world's most populous country were to become infected, it would translate to 13 million people – more than any of the most affected countries in Africa.

A special session of the UN General Assembly on HIV/Aids calculated that up to $10bn (£6.5bn) would need to be spent by 2005 to tackle the disease. But, so far, poor countries' spending on Aids has only reached $3bn (£1.9bn).

Dr Peter Plot, executive director of UNAids, said: "We haven't reached the peak of the Aids epidemic yet ...The money that is needed to be spent is not asking for the moon. By any standards that are used for breaches of security, that's peanuts.

"It's an enormous scandal, the international community has not given what it should have ... The world cannot afford a whole continent, Africa, to be destabilised because of Aids," he said.