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COVID hit HIV detection in Europe, threatens eradication progress - Reuters UK
Nov 30, 2022 58 secs

LONDON, Nov 30 (Reuters) - The number of people in Europe with undiagnosed HIV has risen as testing rates fell during the COVID-19 pandemic, threatening a global goal of ending the disease by 2030, a report said.

The joint World Health Organization (WHO) and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) report said that in 2021 a quarter fewer HIV diagnoses were recorded compared to pre-pandemic levels in the WHO's European region.

"It's likely that reduced testing and extra demands due to the COVID-19 pandemic on clinical sectors and also on public health institutes did impact case detection in 2020 and 2021 and we do believe that this is still continuing even today," ECDC HIV expert Anastasia Pharris told a news briefing on Wednesday.

The report used modelling to predict the number of estimated infections and compared that to testing data provided by 46 of the 53 countries in the WHO's European region.

While efforts to tackle HIV, tuberculosis and malaria began to recover last year after being hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the world is still not on track to defeat these diseases, public-private alliance the Global Fund said in September.

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