4 May 2017

Plenty of progress has been made in the fight against AIDS. Deaths peaked in 2005, at around 2m people. By 2015 that number had fallen to 1.1m. One big reason is that, of the 36.7m people currently infected with HIV, 18.2m are taking antiretroviral drugs that can hold the virus back for decades. Their number has risen more than twentyfold since the turn of the century.But not all the statistics are so encouraging. Around 1.9m adults contracted HIV in 2015. That number has hardly budged since 2010. The great bulk of those infections, about 1.3m in 2015, happen in sub-Saharan Africa. They happen more often to women than to men: 58% of HIV-infected people in the region are female. Women between 15 and 24 are infected at almost eight times the rate of men of the same age.

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