Over 33 mln infected with AIDS virus: UN

By Shen Rujun and Royston Chan

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - An estimated 33.4 million people worldwide are infected with the AIDS virus, up from 33 million in 2007, but more people are living longer due to the availability of drugs, according to a United Nations report.

However, more than half of the people who need life-saving drugs are not getting them, according to the 2009 AIDS epidemic update, launched on Tuesday in Shanghai by the World Health Organisation and Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

Cocktails of drugs can control HIV but there is no cure.

UNAIDS executive director Michel Sidibe told Reuters in an interview in Shanghai that advances in HIV prevention and treatment were still very lopsided.

"The major problem we are facing today is inequity. It is very important we don't continue to have 400,000 babies born with HIV in Africa every year," Sidibe said.

"That is something that the world can deliver. That is why we are calling for virutal elimination of transmission from mother to child by 2015."

Teguest Guerma, acting director of WHO's HIV/AIDS department, told a simultaneous press briefing in Geneva that while more than 4 million people were receiving HIV drugs at the end of 2008, up from 3 million at the end of 2007, many more were going without.

"More than 5 million people need treatment and are not receiving it," Guerma said.