Africa worst hit by AIDS - 2.4m dead, 3.2m infected in sub-Sahara

According to a new UN report, levels of HIV infection in the Middle East and North Africa are increasing and there is an urgent need for better education and prevention strategies.

UNAIDS regional figures show that currently as many as 510,000 people are now infected, with 67,000 new infections and 57,000 deaths, and worldwide 40.3m people are infected.

By far the worst-hit area is the Sudan, where two thirds of women there are completely unaware of condom use.

It is revealed in the report that the main source of infection is unprotected sex, but intravenous drug use is also a concern.

Research has shown that Iran and Libya also have significant levels of HIV infection through intravenous drug use, and although there were variations in infection patterns from country to country, the authors say a lack of adequate education is the main concern across the region.

Apparently only 5% of women knew that condom use could prevent HIV infection and more than two-thirds of the women had never seen or heard of a condom.

In Algeria twice as many new HIV cases were recorded in 2004 compared with a year earlier, with the highest infection levels among sex workers.

Dr Peter Piot UNAIDS executive director says the reality is that the AIDS epidemic continues to outstrip global and national efforts to contain it, and a rapid increase in the scale and scope of HIV prevention programmes is urgently needed.

The research found that in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, many of the people affected were married women who had been infected by their husbands.

Official figures from Egypt indicated that HIV infections were passed on mainly through unprotected sex.

The report calls for "substantive efforts" to prevent the disease spreading in future, as across the region, there is a clear need for more, better and in-depth information about the patterns of HIV transmission.

The good news is that access to anti-retroviral treatments for HIV has improved significantly, with many more people across the world now able to access the drugs.

According to the report more than 3m people died of AIDS-related illnesses in 2005, of these, more than 500,000 were children.

Sub-Saharan Africa is still the hardest hit by HIV/AIDS and two thirds of the people living with HIV, 25.8 million, are in this area.

In 2005, 2.4m people in Sub-Saharan Africa died of an HIV-related illness, and a further 3.2m were infected with the virus.