Current Status of the Estimation on the Number of People Who Living with HIV and the Rate of Undiagnosed Cases

ABSTRACT

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a major public health issue worldwide. As of 2018, 37.9 million people worldwide live with HIV, 1.7 million of which are new HIV infections, and 770,000 are surmised to have died from Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) related illnesses. However, the exact number of HIV infections cannot be confirmed; The Joint Unite Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and World Health Organization (WHO) have computed and disclosed the number of HIV infections, new HIV infections, and AIDS mortality in participating countries for several years to tract and estimate the current HIV prevalence, and the organizations are striving to enhance the accuracy of estimation of current HIV infections by ameliorating various techniques. In South Korea, the government only discloses the number of new HIV infections as an official statistic, and there is no agreed method of estimating current HIV infections. Thus, in this article, we introduce various methods for estimating HIV infections and methods to reflect the number of undiagnosed HIV infections in Korea to the estimate.