WHO Report Finds Large Increase In Sexually Infectious Infections

ILLUSTRATION OF UNSPLASH/JON Tyson

JAKARTA - HIV epidemics, hepatitis viruses, and sexually transmitted infections (IMS) continue to pose significant challenges to public health, leading to 2.5 million deaths each year, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) report.

According to the publication, IMS increased in a number of areas due to the number of cases that exceeded the set target.

By 2022, WHO member states set a target to reduce the number of syphilic infections in adults by tenfold by 2030, from 7.1 million to 0.71 million.

"However, new syphilic cases among adults aged 15-49 years in 2022 increased by more than 1 million to 8 million," the report said, quoted by Anadolu, Wednesday, May 22.

The highest increase in cases occurred in America and Africa.

"The increase in the symptomatic incident has raised great concerns," said WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus.

"Fortunately, there are important advances in a number of other areas, including accelerating access to important health commodities including diagnostics and treatment.

While emphasizing the equipment needed to end the epidemic as a public threat by 2030 already available, Ghebreyesus said "we now need to ensure that, in the context of an increasingly complex world, countries are doing what they can to achieve the ambitious targets they set themselves."

Increased infection

Four cureable IMS - syphilic, gonore, climia, and trikomonizations - caused more than 1 million infections daily, the report said.

In 2022, 230,000 syphilic-related deaths were reported.

The new data also shows a multi-resistant gonore increase because of the 87 countries that increased surveillance of the antimicrobial resistance of gonore, nine countries reported an increase in resistance levels (from 5 percent to 40 percent) to CENTriaxone, the last line of treatment for gonore in 2023.

In 2022, the report recorded around 1.2 million new cases of hepatitis B and nearly one million cases of hepatitis C.

Meanwhile, the estimated number of deaths from the hepatitis virus increased from 1.1 million in 2019 to 1.3 million in 2022 despite effective prevention, diagnosis, and treatment tools.

HIV infections decreased from 1.5 million in 2020 to 1.3 million in 2022, and there were 630,000 HIV-related deaths in the same year. A total of 13 percent of them occur in children under the age of 15.