Monitoring Desk
KABUL: Provincial Public Health officials in Kandahar, in the south of Afghanistan, have said that the positive cases of HIV/AIDS have slightly increased in the province. Figures from the provincial public health directorate show that 107 cases of HIV/AIDS have been reported in the province since 2010. Women and children are also among those infected with the virus.
In 2016, the department registered 18 cases in the province while they registered 20 cases of HIV/AIDS in 2017. “In past eight years from 2010 to 2017, we registered 107 HIV/AIDS cases including 11 women, 92 men and 4 children,” Humyun Rahmani, head of HIV Control Department of Kandahar, told TOLOnews. He added: “In 2016, we registered 18 cases of HIV/AIDS and in 2017 we registered 20 cases of HIV/AIDs. Among them were two women.”
Kandahar residents meanwhile urged Public Health Directorate to mount public awareness on the diseases. “The performance of HIV/AIDS departments in the public health directorate is poor. We ask them to increase public awareness about the harms of the disease and the ways it infects people,” Hamidullah, a resident of Kandahar, said.
According to Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS information on website of the organization, there were at least 36.7 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 2016. Of these, 2.1 million were children (younger than 15 years old). An estimated 1.8 million individuals worldwide became newly infected with HIV in 2016 – about 5,000 new infections per day.
This includes 160,000 children (younger than 15 years). Most of these children live in sub-Saharan Africa and were infected by their HIV-positive mothers during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding.
Currently only 60 percent of people with HIV know their status. The remaining 40 percent (over 14 million people) still need to access HIV testing services. As of July 2017, 20.9 million people living with HIV were accessing antiretroviral therapy (ART) globally, up from 15.8 million in June 2015, 7.5 million in 2010, and less than one million in 2,000.
One million people died from AIDS-related illnesses in 2016, bringing the total number of people who have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic to 35.0 million. Human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a spectrum of conditions caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The HIV spread through sexual activity, infected needles, pregnant women with AIDS.
