Globally, over 42 million people are living with HIV/AIDS; 74 percent of these people – more than 31 million – live in sub-Saharan Africa.

There are 14,000 new infections occurring every day, with 95% of these being in developing countries.

By the year 2010, it is expected that five countries (Ethiopia, Nigeria, China, India and Russia), with 40 percent of the world’s population, will add a minimum of 50 million – and as many as 75 million new infections to the worldwide pool of HIV disease. 

In the United States, an estimated one million people are currently living with HIV and an estimated 40,000 new infections occur each year.

Seventy percent of these new infections occur in men, thirty percent in woman; fifty-four percent of all new infections occur among African Americans; sixty-four percent of the newly infected women are African American; twenty-five percent of the new infections in woman are the result of heterosexual transmission.

As in the world at large, HIV in the US is a “disease of young people” – half of all our new infections occur in people under the age of twenty-five; however, due to the availability of effective treatment it is increasingly a chronic disease that people live with well into their middle adulthood and beyond.

Cumulatively, Pennsylvania has reported 31,782 AIDS cases since the start of the epidemic (31,426 adults and 356 pediatric as of December 2005).

Of this total – which does not include those living with HIV who have not yet been diagnosed with AIDS – forty-nine percent are known to be deceased and fifty-one percent (16,063) are believed to be living with AIDS.

A full fifty-six percent of the Commonwealth’s cases are attributed to Philadelphia.

Of the remaining forty-four percent, the AIDSNET region accounts for 2,119 cases with 756 (36%) of these cases being found in Berks County and 124 (6%) from Schuylkill County.

Based upon this data, Berks County has the highest number of AIDS cases in the coalition and ranks 6th among Pennsylvania’s 67 counties for number of AIDS diagnoses; Schuylkill County ranks 21st among the counties of the Commonwealth and ranks 5th out of the 6 counties in the regional coalition.