If the world does not rapidly scale up in the next five years, the epidemic is likely to spring back with a higher rate of new HIV infections than today,” officials from the UN agency said.
That’s partly because half of the 35 million people who live with HIV today don’t even know they’re HIV-positive, so they don’t know they’re in danger of passing the virus on to others. This year will mark the first full year of a global strategy designed to avert 21 million deaths over the next 15 years. Can it help us address AIDS as a chronic illness, and make HIV’s threat to public health a thing of the past