469 persons detected with AIDS in past year, says Health Minister Nasim

Four hundred and sixty-nine people in Bangladesh have been diagnosed with AIDS over the past one year, Health Minister Mohammed Nasim has said.

Of them, 95 are already dead.

He revealed the figure at a discussion on World AIDS Day held in Dhaka’s Osmani Memorial Auditorium on Tuesday.

The new cases, he said, were detected between November 2014 and October 2015.

Of them, 344 were male, 117 female, and eight belonged to the third gender.  

Of those affected, 358 were in the 25-49 age group, the minister said.

Nasim said the number of AIDS-stricken people in Bangladesh is not high but government and non-government efforts are being made to eradicate the disease.

The first case of AIDS in Bangladesh was detected in 1989. From then on until October this year, 67,869 persons were tested for the HIV virus.  

The tests detected altogether 4,143 people with AIDS, of them 658 succumbed to the disease.