With World Aids day to be held on December 1, new statistics on the disease offer hope.

The number of people living with HIV AIDS has hardly changed over the past two years, stabilizing at 33 million people in most regions, except Africa, according to a report released Tuesday by the UN. The epidemic has probably reached its peak in 1996.

Last year, HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 72% of the 2.7 million new cases worldwide.

Daniel Halperin, AIDS experts at the American University of Harvard, welcomed the reduction in the number of new infections and the deaths due to better access to medicines. According to the UN, four million people are alive today thanks to treatment, ten times more than five years ago.

In their joint report, UNAIDS and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimate that 33.4 million the number of HIV infected people worldwide, is a quasi-stable compared to 33.2 million in 2007. However, this is an estimate made by a mathematical model which has a margin of error of several million people.

AIDS has killed more than 25 million people between 1981 and 2007.

According to Wikipedia, World AIDS Day was first conceived in August 1987 by James W. Bunn and Thomas Netter, two public information officers for the Global Programme on AIDS at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.  Bunn and Netter took their idea to Dr. Jonathan Mann, Director of the Global Programme on AIDS (now known as UNAIDS). Dr. Mann liked the concept, approved it, and agreed with the recommendation that the first observance of World AIDS Day should be 1 December, 1988.

Number Of People With AIDS Stabilizing, World AIDS Day Dec 1