Brazil: 5 people were infected with HIV every hour in 2021
Anyone can get it, but the virus disproportionately impacts certain social groups, in a calculation crossed by inequalities and social vulnerabilities. This characteristic of the Covid-19 pandemic is also similar to another pandemic that, even at the age of 40, is still loaded with the moral stigmas typical of a virus with mostly sexual transmission. AIDS today disproportionately affects people of color, men who have sex with men, drug users and trans women, as shown in the annual report of UNAids, the United Nations program on HIV/AIDS. In Brazil, every hour, at least five people were infected by the HIV virus in 2021. According to a UN estimate, over the past year Brazil had 50,000 new cases, which made the country reach the mark of 960,000 people living with HIV. Worldwide, there are 38 million people living with the virus. In 2021, there were 650,000 deaths from AIDS in the world, 13,000 of them in Brazil. "We have a stable pandemic with a very high number of annual deaths because there is a very large inequality in the country that makes access to treatment and prevention and diagnosis measures unequal," explained infectious disease specialist Esper Kallas.