The Global HIV Burden

When World AIDS Day was founded in 1988, it was meant to raise awareness for HIV and AIDS, show support to people living with HIV and commemorate those who have died from AIDS-related illness. Taking place on December 1 each year, World AIDS Day was also the first global health day. And while HIV may have taken a backseat to Covid-19 for a couple of years, it is still a global health burden, killing an estimated 630,000 people last year, particularly in less developed regions of the world.

In recent years, the outlook for those infected with HIV has become significantly better though, thanks to antiretroviral therapy, which was accessed by 30 million people last year. According to UNAIDS, an estimated 39 million people were living with HIV in 2022, while 1.3 million became newly infected with HIV.

Our latest Racing Bars video shows how the number of people living with HIV grew from 8 million in 1990 to more than 38 million in 2021 and on which regions HIV places the largest health burden. In 2021, roughly two-thirds of all people living with HIV were located in Sub-Saharan Africa, highlighting the disproportionate toll that HIV takes on the world’s poorer regions.