United Nations 2025 Global AIDS Update says if funding not replaced, Trump’s cuts may reverse ‘decades’ of progress on HIV/AIDS.Unless funding is replaced, the halt to foreign aid by the administration of US President Donald Trump could reverse “decades of progress” on HIV, the United Nations warns in its annual report on HIV/AIDS.
The United States’ decision to make cuts to the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) could result in six million extra HIV infections and four million more AIDS-related deaths by 2029, according to the 2025 Global AIDS Update released on Thursday.
“HIV programmes in low- and middle-income countries have been rocked by sudden, major financial disruptions that threaten to reverse years of progress in the response to HIV,” the UNAIDS report said.
“Wars and conflict, widening economic inequalities, geopolitical shifts and climate change shocks – the likes of which are unprecedented in the global HIV response – are stoking instability and straining multilateral cooperation,” it added.
According to the report, people acquiring HIV and those dying from AIDS-related causes were at their lowest levels in “more than 30 years”.
However, by the end of 2024, the decline in numbers was “not sufficient” to end AIDS as a public threat by 2030.
Still, the report found that an estimated 1.3 million people acquired HIV in 2024, 40 percent less than in 2024.
In new infections, there was a 56 percent decline in sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to half of all people who “acquired HIV globally in 2024”.
“Five countries, mostly from sub-Saharan Afric …