What’s Your AIDS IQ?

39,000,000. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 85.6 million people have acquired HIV and 40.4 million have died of AIDS-related illnesses.

1.3 million. This represents a 59% decrease compared to 1995, when new infections reached their peak. 2022 saw the fewest new HIV infections in decades, with the biggest declines in sub-Saharan Africa. However, in some regions, like Eastern Europe and Central Asia, new infections are on the rise.

One person every minute. In 2022, 630,000 people worldwide died from AIDS-related causes. This is down from a peak of approximately 2 million people in 2004.

75%. 76.4% of all people living with HIV, or 29.8 million, were accessing antiretroviral therapy in 2022, up from 7.7 million in 2010. This is largely thanks to programs such as the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

20 million. Antiretroviral therapy has averted nearly 20.8 million deaths since its introduction in the mid-1990s. amfAR-funded research contributed to the development of four of the main classes of anti-HIV drugs in use today.

True. In 2020, Southern states accounted for 51% of new HIV diagnoses, despite making up just 38% of the overall U.S. population.

13%. Regular testing remains critically important. Once people living with HIV know their status, more than 80% are linked to care within one month of diagnosis.

False: New pediatric infections are the lowest they have been since the 1980s. Since 2000, over 3 million pediatric infections were averted thanks to programs preventing mother-to-child transmission. Early studies supported in part by amfAR led to the use of anti-HIV drugs to prevent mothers from passing the virus onto their newborn babies.

0.5%. This small group of people are known as elite controllers. Researchers are studying them to determine the cause of this natural immunity and to see if it could somehow be replicated in people who are not naturally resistant to HIV.

2008. Timothy Ray Brown was the first of a handful of people, all with HIV and blood cancers, to have been cured as the result of a stem-cell transplant using donor cells resistant to HIV. amfAR researchers were able to confirm the cure. However, we are still some way from a cure that can be made available to all 39 million people living with HIV.