UNAIDS: Fiji's surging HIV outbreak can put the entire Pacific at risk
- Admin
- Jul 21
- 3 min read
Diana G. Mendoza
Manila—Fiji’s exploding epidemic of human immunodeficiency virus can put the entire Pacific region at risk, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS warned as it sought to muster international support for the South Pacific country’s effort to curb the outbreak.
“Fiji has the fastest growing epidemic, as new infections increased by more than 3,000 percent since 2010,” said Eamonn Murphy, regional director of UNAIDS Asia Pacific, Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Murphy presented the UNAIDS report titled “2025 Global AIDS Update, AIDS, Crisis and the Power to Transform,” in a forum held in Bangkok, Thailand and virtually last July 17.
The report stated that in 2024, there were an estimated 6.9 million people living with HIV in Asia and the Pacific. “Next to Eastern and southern Africa, this is the world’s largest epidemic.”
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It also stated: “This region accounts for nine of the 32 countries where new HIV infections have risen since 2010. These are Fiji (3,091 percent), the Philippines (562 percent), Afghanistan (187 percent), Papua New Guinea (84 percent), Bhutan (67 percent), Sri Lanka (48 percent), Timor-Leste (42 percent), Bangladesh (33 percent) and Lao PDR (16 percent).”
In his message during the report launch, Murphy said, “To put the numbers in perspective for Fiji, this has been an increase from less than 100 new infections in 2010 to 1,300 a year in 2024,” Murphy said.
“Fiji is a very small country that has a fast-growing incidence of injecting drug use and sexual transmission, but must hold its continued focus on the epidemic that was already in the country in recent years,” Murphy added.
The U.N. official said the rapid increase of new HIV cases in recent years prompted the Fijian government to declare an HIV outbreak in January 2025 and allocate an additional 10 million Fijian dollars in domestic resources to handle its public health crisis.
In late 2024, the Ministry for Health and Medical Services of Fiji noted a threefold increase in newly-reported HIV cases from numbers in 2023.
When the ministry took a closer look at the trends, they noted the nine-fold increase in reported cases over the last five years. This set off the country’s criteria for declaring HIV a national outbreak.
The declaration started a set of strategies such as needle syringe services that allow people who inject drugs to obtain clean and unused needles and other paraphernalia and pe-exposure prophylaxis, a medicine provided to people at risk to prevent them from getting HIV from sex or injecting drug use.
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While Murphy lauded the Fijian government’s prompt actions and mobilizing domestic resources, he urged the government to maintain its health strategies that prevent new infections, provide life-saving treatment to persons living with HIV and ensure access to services to its vulnerable populations.
“Fiji doesn’t stand alone just because it’s an island in the middle of the Pacific,” Murphy said, elaborating that “interconnection between communities across this part of the region is significant and this epidemic can shift and can have an impact elsewhere.”
Murphy said the rising HIV infection in Fiji can put the entire Pacific region at risk, as he urged the governments of the UNAIDS’ 32 member countries to show solidarity with the Fijian government’s decision to allocate resources and to strengthen HIV prevention and treatment.
The UNAIDS report noted that since 2010, new HIV infections have reduced by just 17 percent, and AIDS-related deaths have declined by half (53 percent), but with 150,000 deaths in the region in 2024.
“One in four new infections globally is in the Asia Pacific. In 2024, 300,000 people were newly infected in the region,” the report also noted.
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