HIV Epidemic

HIV Epidemic

HIV is an epidemic that affects everyone globally and thus qualifies as an issue of global significance. In the year 2016, the affected population was approximately 36.7 million and among them were 2.1 million children (Mikkelsen et al., 2017). The rate of new infections was capped at 1.8 million globally. In children, new infection rates were at 160,000 thousand with a majority of them coming from sub-Saharan Africa and infected by their HIV positive mothers during breastfeeding, childbirth or pregnancy. In terms of awareness, 70% of the affected population knew their status in 2016. By the year 2017, those accessing antiretroviral therapies were 20.9 million a remarkable increase in comparison to 2015 which had 15.8 million.  The number of people who have succumbed to AIDS is 35.0 million with one million deaths in the year 2016 (Makhema et al., 2017).

Although HIV is a global problem, infection rates occur differently in various regions and