WHO and UNAIDS warn of service disruptions, widening inequities, and mounting drug-resistance threats, while highlighting innovations and commitments needed to end AIDS as a public health threat.
December 1 marks World AIDS Day 2025 at a moment of significant strain for the global HIV response, with new reports from the World Health Organization (WHO), UNAIDS, and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) describing widespread service disruptions, rising inequities, and increasing drug-resistance threats, but also innovation, and renewed political commitment across regions.
Across Africa and other high-burden settings, WHO reports continued declines in AIDS-related mortality due to expanded antiretroviral therapy (ART) access. However, persistent gaps in HIV testing, viral suppression, PrEP uptake, and resistance monitoring continue to impede progress toward global elimination goals. WHO leaders emphasize that the next five years will be critical for strengthening prevention coverage, improving retention in care, and scaling systems capable of detecting and responding to emerging drug resistance.¹
The WHO World AIDS Day 2025 campaign, themed “Overcoming disruption, transforming the AIDS response,” highlights how funding reductions, political instability, and human-rights challenges have interrupted HIV prevention, testing, and treatment services worldwide. WHO estimates that 40.8 million people were living with HIV in 2024, 630,000 people died from HIV-related causes, and 1.3 million acquired HIV, underscoring the ongoing global burden despite decades of scientific advancement.¹
WHO urges countries to prioritize and integrate HIV prevention, testing, treatment, advanced HIV disease management, and drug-resistance surveillance into primary care systems. The organization stresses that fragmented services, particularly in low-resource settings, continue to delay diagnosis and impede retention in care.¹
WHO also calls attention to entrenched inequities: children, adolescent girls and young women, and key populations, including men who have sex with men, transgender and gender-diverse people, sex workers, people who use drugs, and individuals in prisons, continue to face disproportionate HIV risk and limited access to services across regions.¹
Innovation remains a critical component of WHO’s message. Long-acting prevention tools, including six-monthly injectable lenacapavir, represent important opportunities to expand protection in high-incidence populations. WHO also emphasizes the central role of community leadership, noting that people living with HIV provide essential insight and trust needed to restore disrupted services and strengthen health-system resilience.¹
Global agencies report significant disruptions to HIV prevention, testing, and treatment services in 2025 amid declining funding and rising inequities.
WHO’s new 2026–2030 framework outlines cross-cutting strategies to strengthen HIV drug-resistance surveillance and preserve treatment effectiveness.
UNAIDS and PAHO emphasize expanded long-acting prevention tools, robust laboratory capacity, and investment in community-led programs to stay on track for 2030 HIV goals.
A new UNAIDS report released ahead of World AIDS Day, Overcoming Disruption, Transforming the AIDS Response, describes the most significant setback to the HIV response in decades. International health assistance is projected to decline by 30%-40% in 2025 compared with 2023, according to OECD estimates cited in the report.²
These cuts have triggered widespread service disruptions, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. UNAIDS highlights sharp declines in PrEP access, major reductions in voluntary medical male circumcision, and significant losses of prevention programs for adolescent girls and young women, a population that experienced 570 new HIV infections per day in 2024.²
“The funding crisis has exposed the fragility of the progress we fought so hard to achieve,” Winnie Byanyima, UNAIDS executive director said in a statement. “Behind every data point in this report are people, babies and children missed for HIV screening or early HIV diagnosis, young women cut off from prevention support, and communities suddenly left without services and care.”²
More than 60% of women-led community organizations have suspended essential programs. Modeling suggests that failure to meet 2030 HIV targets could result in 3.3 million additional HIV infections between 2025 and 2030.²
Despite these challenges, several countries, including Nigeria, Uganda, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, and Tanzania, have increased domestic investments, with some maintaining or increasing ART initiation rates. Long-acting PrEP, including twice-yearly injectables, and new partnerships involving the Gates Foundation, UNITAID, PEPFAR, and the Global Fund may help offset disruptions by lowering costs to as little as USD $40 per person per year.²
In the Americas, PAHO’s World AIDS Day 2025 campaign, “Zero AIDS Deaths by 2030,” underscores the need to prevent deaths from advanced HIV disease, a persistent cause of hospitalization and mortality despite widespread ART availability. PAHO reports substantial progress in ART expansion but highlights persistent gaps in early diagnosis, PrEP uptake, rapid ART initiation, and management of advanced HIV disease, including cryptococcal meningitis, tuberculosis, and severe bacterial infections. These gaps disproportionately affect young women, key populations, and people who present late to care due to stigma, discrimination, or fragmented health systems.³
PAHO emphasizes scaling long-acting PrEP, strengthening community-led programs, improving treatment literacy, and expanding testing strategies. Regional discussions, including the webinar “Alliance for HIV Elimination in the Americas,” aim to advance coordination toward the region’s elimination goals.³
In parallel with World AIDS Day, WHO released the Integrated Drug Resistance Action Framework for HIV, Hepatitis B and C, and STIs (2026–2030), outlining global priorities for limiting the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) across these pathogens. The framework addresses rising resistance to HIV antiretrovirals, hepatitis B and C antivirals, and first-line therapies for bacterial STIs.⁴
WHO warns that drug resistance threatens progress made over the last two decades and could reverse gains toward ending AIDS and controlling hepatitis and STIs as public health threats.The framework outlines five strategic areas: prevention and response, monitoring and surveillance, research and innovation, laboratory capacity, and governance and enabling mechanisms.⁴
“Drug resistance threatens decades of progress in HIV, hepatitis and STI control. This framework is a call to action for countries, communities and partners to unite around a shared agenda,” said Tereza Kasaeva, MD, PhD, director of WHO’s Department for HIV, Tuberculosis, Hepatitis and Sexually Transmitted Infections.⁴
The roadmap builds on the 2024 UN High-Level Meeting on AMR and emphasizes antimicrobial stewardship, strengthened laboratory networks, and equitable access to prevention and treatment.² As WHO notes, ending AIDS by 2030 will require sustained funding, expanded access to long-acting prevention and treatment, and robust systems to detect resistance and treatment failure.⁴
Across WHO, UNAIDS, and PAHO, the central message for World AIDS Day 2025 is that progress toward ending AIDS is achievable but increasingly fragile. Meeting the 2030 global targets will require sustained political leadership, renewed investment in HIV services, and expanded access to long-acting prevention and treatment. Global agencies also emphasize the need for equitable systems that reach children, adolescent girls and young women, and key populations; strengthened surveillance and laboratory capacity to detect emerging resistance; and adequately resourced community organizations that remain essential to delivering prevention, treatment, and support.
As Winnie Byanyima noted, “Millions of lives depend on the choices we make today.”²Despite rising challenges, global leaders emphasize that with coordinated action, innovation, and strengthened health systems, the world can still accelerate progress toward ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030.
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