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40% HIV sufferers ‘unaware of infection’
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THE World Health Organization warned that nearly half of all people with HIV around the globe do not know they are infected, and called for broader access to at-home testing kits.
The UN health agency said that 40 percent of people with the virus that causes AIDS, or more than 14 million people worldwide, are unaware of their status, according to 2015 estimates.
That marks a huge improvement over just a decade earlier, when only 12 percent of people with HIV were estimated to know they had the virus.
But the continued lack of diagnosis, remains a major obstacle to implementing WHO’s recommendation for everyone with HIV to be offered anti-retroviral therapy, or ART.
Today, more than 80 percent of everyone diagnosed with HIV is receiving ART.
But WHO chief Margaret Chan warned that since so many people do not know their status, “millions of people with HIV are still missing out on life-saving treatment, which can also prevent HIV transmission to others.”
“HIV self-testing should open the door for many more people to know their HIV status and find out how to get treatment and access prevention services,” she said.
Self-testing — using saliva or blood from a finger prick — a has been shown to nearly double the frequency of HIV testing among men who have sex with men. And studies in Kenya found that the male partners of pregnant women were twice as likely to get tested if they were offered self-testing.
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