ASIATODAY.ID, GENEVA – The World Health Organization (WHO) report, Tuesday, May 21 2024 stated that the epidemic of HIV, viral hepatitis and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) continues to pose a significant challenge to public health, and causes 2.5 million deaths every year.
According to the publication, STIs are increasing in a number of regions because the number of cases exceeds the set targets.
In 2022, WHO member countries set a target of reducing the number of syphilis infections in adults tenfold by 2030, from 7.1 million to 0.71 million.
“However, new syphilis cases among adults aged 15-49 years in 2022 will increase by more than 1 million to 8 million,” the report said.
The highest increase in cases occurred in the Americas and Africa.
“The increasing incidence of syphilis is a cause for great concern,” said WHO Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus.
“Fortunately, there has been important progress in a number of other areas including accelerating access to critical health commodities including diagnostics and treatment.”
While stressing that the tools needed to end the epidemic as a public threat by 2030 were in place, Ghebreyesus said “we now need to ensure that, in the context of an increasingly complex world, countries do what they can to achieve the ambitious targets they set for themselves .”
Increased infections
Four curable STIs – syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia and trichomoniasis – cause more than 1 million infections every day, according to the report.
In 2022, there were 230,000 syphilis-related deaths reported. The new data also shows an increase in multi-resistant gonorrhea as of the 87 countries conducting increased gonorrhea antimicrobial resistance surveillance, nine countries reported increasing resistance rates (from 5 percent to 40 percent) to ceftriaxone, the last-line treatment for gonorrhea by 2023.
In 2022, the report notes that there will be around 1.2 million new cases of hepatitis B and almost one million cases of hepatitis C.
Meanwhile, the estimated number of deaths from viral hepatitis increased from 1.1 million in 2019 to 1.3 million in 2022 despite effective prevention, diagnosis and treatment tools.
HIV infections decreased from 1.5 million in 2020 to 1.3 million in 2022, and there were 630,000 HIV-related deaths in the same year. As many as 13 percent of them occurred in children under 15 years of age. (UN News)
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