A report by the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organisation says the epidemic is not losing momentum. It shows that a record 2.6 million people died of AIDS this year while new infections continued unabated, with an estimated 5.6 million adults and children contracting HIV.

"With an epidemic of this scale every new infection adds to the ripple effect, impacting families, communities, households and, increasingly, businesses and economies," UNAIDS director Peter Piot said. "AIDS has emerged as the greatest single threat to development in many countries," he added. About 95 percent of people with HIV live in developing countries "where poverty, poor health systems and limited resources for prevention and care fuel the spread of the virus," the report says. The report containsa few positive notes.

The number of people with HIV in India, around four million, is lower than previously estimated. Thailand and The Philippines have had "sustained success in reducing HIV risk and lowering or stabilising HIV rates." Brazil and some other Latin American countries are now providing antiretroviral drugs to people with HIV, the report says. But these facts stand out against an increasingly sombre background. In sub-Saharan Africa, new evidence shows clearly for the first time that more women are infected with HIV than men. UNAIDS and the WHO estimate that 12.2 million African women and 10.1 million African men aged between 15 and 49 carry the virus today. "Why more women than men are infected is not fully understood," the report says.

"However a prime factor is surely the difference in age patterns of HIV infection ... women tend to become infected far younger than men for both biological and cultural reasons." Some studies indicated that in some parts of Africa girls between the ages of15 and 19 are five or six times more likely to be HIV-positive than boys of their own age, the report says.