Earlier today we reported the positive news from the U.N.'s new study on the global AIDS pandemic: the global rate of HIV infections has fallen 25 percent in the last ten years. The chart above illustrates the geographical distribution of percentage of HIV incidence (new infections) between 2001 and 2009. Again the results are somewhat encouraging: notice the sharp decline in the incidence of HIV in sub-Saharan African and in South and Southeast Asia, represented by the boxes with downward sloping red lines between 2001 and 2009. Latin America, the Caribbean and Oceania showed less pronounced reductions, while incidence has leveled out in North America, Europe and East Asia while, unfortunately, increasing in the Middle East and North Africa. 

While the numbers do point to an upside, the battle over the AIDS epidemic is far from over. The shading of the map itself represents the overall rate of HIV prevalence in a country. Sub-Saharan Africa, as seen in its dark blue shading still is plagued by HIV rates of over 4 percent, with the prevalence of HIV in the adult populations in a few countries still exceeding twenty percent as recently as 2010. The ocean blue shade represents HIV prevalence between .5 and 4 percent, while light blue is less than .5 percent. Gray denotes no data. Here's a link to the PDF, and the image blown up below.

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Eli Rosenberg