World AIDS Day 2016

The German Foundation for World Population (DSW) has set up this 12-meter-high (39-foot-high) condom in an upmarket part of Cologne to create awareness of sexually transmitted diseases on World AIDS Day. The DSW particularly wants to draw attention to developing countries where cultural taboos prevent people from talking about safe sex.

Gaetan Dugas, an Air Canada flight attendant, was long believed to have carried​ the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to the West in the 1970s. Some 78 million people have been infected with the virus since the start of the pandemic and today, there are over 37 million people living with the virus worldwide, the UN says. Medical advances proved Dugas was not to blame for the spread of HIV.

The UN's program on AIDS, UNAIDS, says that 1.1 million people died from AIDS in 2015. Out of these, 110,000 victims were under the age of 15. Some 35 million people have died since the beginning of the AIDS pandemic.​

Asia has around 5 million people infected with HIV. New infections have declined, but only 41 percent of people have access to treatment. There are 2.1 million people living with HIV in India, according to the NGO Avert. In China, that number is 780,000.

Around 19 million people live with HIV in eastern and southern Africa. In western and central Africa, around 6.5 million people live with the disease. In the Middle East and North Africa, that figure is 230,000.

HIV has left no continent untouched. In 2015, 2.4 million people were living with HIV in western and central Europe and North America. Some 22,000 people died of AIDS-related causes last year, according to UN estimates.

There are around 2 million people living with AIDS in South America, the UN says. 50,000 people died of the disease last year. The number of AIDS-related deaths has declined by 18 percent since 2010 and more than half of the continent's population has access to treatment.

But there is good news. AIDS-related deaths have fallen by 45 percent since 2005 worldwide when the virus killed around 2 million people. Globally, the average access to treatment has risen to 46 percent, UNAIDS reports.

Ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1, the World Health Organization (WHO) advocated affordable self-testing kits for people wanting to know their HIV status in the privacy of their homes. According to the EU and the WHO, one in seven people is unaware they have been infected with HIV.

Scientists are excited about an experimental HIV vaccine they hope could prevent new infections. Researchers launched a clinical trial in South Africa to test the new drug on over 5,400 people. The drug is based on a vaccine investigated in Thailand and believed to have a 30 percent protection rate over a three to five years. Researchers hope to have results from the South African study by 2020.