More than four million people with HIV in low and middle income nations were receiving antiretroviral treatment at the end of 2008, up by more than a third from the 2.97 million at the end of 2007, says a report by the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, and Unicef.

But despite the increased access, more than five million of the estimated 9.5 million adults and children who need antiretroviral drugs were still without access to them, it says.

The gap in access makes it “absolutely critical to accelerate programme delivery to reach universal access goals,” says the report.

“The current pace of scaling up is clearly insufficient. …