FACTBOX-AIDS in Latin America and the Caribbean
Aug 3 (Reuters) - An international conference on AIDS opened on Sunday in Mexico City, making Latin America a first-time host for the biennial meeting that is the largest gathering of AIDS experts.
Here are details about AIDS in Latin America and the Caribbean from the United Nations AIDS agency UNAIDS :
* LATIN AMERICA:
-- New HIV infections in the region in 2007 totaled an estimated 140,000, bringing to 1.7 million the number of people infected with the AIDS virus in this region.
-- An estimated 63,000 Latin Americans died of AIDS last year.
-- The overall levels of HIV infections in Latin America have changed little in the past decade.
-- The region's biggest epidemics are in the countries with the biggest populations, notably Brazil, which is home to more than 40 percent, 730,000, of the people living with the virus, followed by Mexico, with 200,000 who are HIV positive.
-- Across South America, levels of HIV infection among female sex workers have tended to be much lower than those among men who have sex with men. HIV prevalence among female sex workers has been found to be 10 percent in Honduras, 4 percent in Guatemala, and 3 percent in El Salvador.
-- HIV transmission as a result of injecting drug use still features in several of South America's epidemics.
-- Research has uncovered hidden epidemics of HIV among men who have sex with men in several Central American countries, including Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama. Around 57 percent of the HIV diagnoses to date in Mexico have been attributed to unprotected sex between men.
* THE CARIBBEAN:
-- In the Caribbean, AIDS is one of the leading causes of death in adults aged 15-44.
-- An estimated 230,000 people had HIV in the Caribbean in 2007 (about three quarters of them in the Dominican Republic and Haiti), while an estimated 20,000 people were newly infected with HIV in this region, and some 14,000 people died of AIDS.
-- Most of the epidemics in the region appear to have stabilized, while a few have declined in urban areas. The latter trend is especially evident in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
-- In the Dominican Republic, for example, HIV prevalence declined from 1 percent in 2002 to an estimated 0.8 percent in 2007. (Reuters/UNAIDS/www.unaids.org/)
