Cape Town - The tide has turned in the fight against HIV as globally, some 19.5 million people are now able to access life-saving treatment.
With that, Aids-related deaths had nearly halved since 2005.
UNAIDS on Thursday released a new report - Ending Aids- which stated that some 53% of all people living with HIV, had access to HIV treatment. Some 36.7 million people globally are infected with HIV.
With these improvements, UNAIDS is confident the goal of reaching the “global target of 30 million people on treatment by 2020” will be realised. In 2016, Aids-related deaths had dropped to 1 million from the 1.9 million in 2005.
UNAIDS executive director Michel Sidibé said: "We met the 2015 target of 15 million people on treatment and we are on track to double that. We will continue to scale up to reach everyone in need and honour our commitment of leaving no one behind."
The report stated that the region which showed the most progress was eastern and southern Africa, which has the greatest number of people affected by HIV, a number which accounts for more than half the people living with HIV in the world.
"Since 2010, Aids-related deaths have declined by 42%. New HIV infections have declined by 29%, including a 56% drop in new HIV infections among children over the same period, a remarkable achievement resulting from HIV treatment and prevention efforts that is putting eastern and Southern Africa on track towards ending its AIDS epidemic,” the report stated.
By 2016 some 70% of people living with HIV knew their status and of those, 77% were able to access treatment. Of those on treatment, 82% were “virally suppressed, protecting their health and helping to prevent transmission of the virus”.
In South Africa, there are about 7 million adults and children living with HIV. Of those, 4 million were women, 2.7 million were men over the age of 15 and 240 000 children under the age of 14 were infected.
There were about 380 000 newly-infected adults and children, of that figure 200 000 were women over the age of 15 and 170 000 men over the age of 15. Some 5100 were children, the report stated.
Ending Aids found that providing services closer to where people live and work would be a key factor in ending the Aids epidemic and as a result UNAIDS and the African Union were backing an initiative which would recruit and train "two million community health workers in Africa to further bolster the capacity of health systems to deliver health-care services across the region".
"When health services reach the doorsteps, the health of families and communities is transformed. Community health workers will become the backbone of strong and resilient health systems across Africa," said Sidibé.