London: Health experts all over the world, have cited AIDS as the killer virus threatening world population and according to statistics it might as well be true.
Researchers at the Geneva based World Health Organisaton have said that AIDS will become the world’s most burdensome disease by 2030, overtaking today’s top problem of poor perinatal health including low birth weight.
"HIV is not going to come down unless we invest more in prevention efforts," said Colin Mathers, one of WHO researchers, who produced the report as part of the Global Burden of Disease project.
“Even if rates of HIV infection remain constant, growing populations in the developing world will propel it to the top of the rankings at a time when rates of other communicable diseases are set to improve,” she said.
She said that the results were in sharp contrast to the group’s last prediction made in 1996, which found that heart disease would be the top global health problem in 2020, with HIV a mere tenth.
Nature quoted the report, published in PLoS Medicine, as saying that by 2030, AIDS could account for almost one in every eight years of life lost through death or disability.
Other infectious diseases, however, would decrease as a result of improving control measures.
“Malaria, diarrhoea and tuberculosis are all due to fall off the top ten list. The bad news is that this spells a relative growth in smoking-related disease, cancer and road injuries,” the report said.
The report further said though AIDS won’t be the world's biggest killer by 2030, heart disease would remain the killer even then AIDS would become the most burdensome.
“Overall, cases are expected to rise from 2.8 million worldwide in 2002, to 6.5 million in 2030. The 1996 report was too ready to hope that countries would control the spread of HIV, and did not factor in the explosion of infections in sub-Saharan Africa,” said Mathers.
"In 1996 we were much more optimistic that the world would take up prevention methods. But over the past decade, apart from a few countries, efforts have not been made to address prevention," she said.
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