Sweden exceeds UNAIDS HIV goals but faces new challenges

Sweden has reduced its HIV incidence and surpassed the UNAIDS 95-95-95 targets, but exogenous infections, particularly among migrants, require renewed focus to maintain progress. Report: Sweden surpasses the UNAIDS 95-95-95 target: estimating HIV-1 incidence, 2003 to 2022 . Image Credit: Rawpixel.

com / Shutterstock The United Nations program on human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), or UNAIDS 95-95-95 targets, were set by the United Nations to help end the AIDS epidemic by 2025. In a recent study published in the journal Eurosurveillance , a team of researchers from Sweden evaluated the country’s progress towards achieving these goals by analyzing the number of undiagnosed HIV cases and trends in new infections. Sweden had already reached the UNAIDS 90-90-90 target in 2015 and surpassed the 95-95-95 target in 2018.

Background Progress towards the UNAIDS 95–95–95 goals in Sweden, 2003–2022 ART: antiretroviral therapy; UNAIDS: Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. The first goal, fraction diagnosed among all infected, is shown as a violin plot (where the whiskers indicate the 95% credible interval) estimated by our biomarker -informed incidence model. The other goals are real fractions informed directly from Sweden’s National Quality Registry InfCareHIV.

Since the discovery of HIV/AIDS in 1981, approximately 85 million people have been identified as infected, and statistics from 2022 indicate that close to 39 million indivi.