How many people die of AIDS each year?

Yearly AIDS Deaths

According to UNAIDS, the AIDS epidemic claimed an estimated 2.8 million (between 2.4 and 3.3 million) lives in 2005 of which more than half a million (570,000) were children.

It should however be noted that this is only an estimate. And that obtaining accurate figures is complicated by several factors:

• People do not die of AIDS as such - they die of the diseases that AIDS has made them vulnerable to. Therefore, the cause of death is very often not given as AIDS or AIDS-related.
• Diagnosing a death as AIDS related relies on the person having been diagnosed as HIV-positive .. a diagnosis that has often not been made in a resource-limited setting.
• With advances in medicine, AIDS is "greying". Instead of dieing from AIDS-related conditions, people who were living with AIDS are increasingly dieing of old age.
• In order to spare the feelings of relatives (and to protect them from the stigma of being associated with AIDS) official causes of death are frequently recorded in a vague manner.