VIDEO. “Just over 20,000 people are living with HIV and not knowing it”

“It is estimated that just over 20,000 people are living with HIV and not knowing it” in France, said the managing director of Sidaction Florence Thune on Wednesday December 1 on franceinfo, on the occasion of the world day against AIDS.

She believes that there is “a direct impact of the health crisis on the HIV epidemic for two years in France and globally”, while the number of screenings fell by 14% in 2020, even up to 50% during confinement. “We did not catch up afterwards and we saw that both HIV was completely eclipsed by Covid-19 and that people felt that it was not a priority to go for a screening test “, she adds. Florence Thune recalls that Olivier Véran has undertaken to extend in January the operation “Au Labo sans ordo” which allows you to go to any laboratory without a prescription to be tested for free.

The UN agency in charge of AIDS estimates that the HIV epidemic could be reduced to nothing by the end of the decade, while AIDS kills some 700,000 people around the world each year. But Florence Thune “fears that it is not achievable “, noting that the indicators were already not good before the health crisis. “We will have to make extremely significant investments to achieve this 2030 objective”, in particular in the search for treatments and in prevention.