For the first time since AIDS was identified in the mid-1980, the United Nations says the numbers of AIDS deaths and infections have started to decline. However, new infections worldwide have far outpaced efforts to provide anti-retroviral treatment to patients.

Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of AIDS at the World Health Organization said “we are seeing a decline in global AIDS deaths.” The new figures, released by WHO and the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), also show that the number of infections from HIV have begun to fall as well. This might be due to the UN health programmes that provided anti-retroviral treatment to an additional 1 million people in 2007. However, about 2.5 million people became infected with the AIDS virus in the same year.

UN warns that unless immediate actions are not taken worldwide to fight HIV, “the epidemic’s humanitarian and economic toll will continue to increase.”

The report will be presented to the two-day UN General Assembly’s HIV/AIDS conference on Tuesday, which is called to review progress made since 2001, when the organization first launched programmes worldwide to try to halt the spread of the epidemic by 2015.

Overall, these programs have had success but there are still disparities (in the way HIV-positive people are treated) across and even within countries, UN said.

An estimated 32.2 million people worldwide were living with HIV in December 2007 compared with the figure of 39.5 million the two institutions released the year before. Also, the annual rate of new infections seemed to have declined over the last decade. There were 2.5 million new infections in 2007 down from 3.2 million infections in 1998.

Half of all HIV infection are adult women, 61 percent of them being located in Africa’s sub-Saharan nations. In fact, sub-Saharan Africa remains the epicenter of the global malady. Of the 32.2 million people living with HIV, about 22.5 are registered here, as well as 76 percent of those who die because of AIDS annually. Also 90 percent of all HIV positive children in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Because treatment against AIDS was made available in recent years, the number of AIDS deaths in 2007 was estimated at 2.1 million down from 3.9 million in 2001.

Although rates appear to decline overall, there are places like the U.S., the UK and Germany where the number of people with HIV is on the rise again, the UN said, a sign that clearly shows that anti-AIDS programmes have diminished.

UN desires to make prevention treatment available to all HIV-infected people in order to meet its goal of reversing AIDS by 2015. For now, anti-retroviral treatment coverage increased by 42 percent in the last six years, reaching 3 million people in low-income and middle-income countries in 2007.Also, funding for AIDS/HIV-related activities reached 10 billion dollars in these countries, a 12 percent increase over 2006.

“There’s still a huge epidemic out there that still needs huge resources to win the battle,” Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance, an international non-governmental group headquartered in Washington DC said.