Sri Lanka has recorded 860 new HIV infections over the past year, taking the total number of HIV-positive people reported in the country to 7,403, according to the National STD/AIDS Control Programme.
The figures were reported by NewsFirst, which said the programme recorded 1,217,419 HIV tests nationally by the end of the fourth quarter of last year. The detection rate across those tests was 0.07%.
Who is being infected
The programme reported a sharp gender skew in new cases during the fourth quarter, with a male-to-female ratio of 7:1.
New infections were also recorded among people aged 15 to 24. Prevalence in the adult population as a whole remains at 0.1% — low by international standards, and the reason Sri Lanka is still classified as a low-prevalence country despite the rising case count.
Health authorities repeated their standing message that early testing matters: timely diagnosis allows people living with HIV to stay healthy on treatment and sharply reduces the risk of onward transmission. Sri Lanka has been expanding testing access, including through a self-testing platform launched in August and HIV testing written into the Suraksha student insurance scheme.
The global picture Sri Lanka sits inside
Sri Lanka is one of 21 countries where new HIV infections rose in 2025, a finding that comes from UNAIDS. The agency’s own July 2026 report states that new infections “rose in three regions and 21 countries in 2025”, against a global total of 1.2 million people who acquired HIV that year.
UNAIDS also reported that of the 41 million people living with HIV worldwide, around 9 million were not on treatment, almost half of all children living with HIV had no access to antiretroviral therapy, and 570,000 people died of AIDS-related illness in 2025.
NewsFirst lists Afghanistan, Nepal, Kenya, Sudan, Brazil, Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt, Senegal and the Philippines alongside Sri Lanka among the 21. Two of those names sit oddly in that company: the same UNAIDS release names Nepal and Kenya among seven countries that have achieved close to an 80% reduction in new infections since 2010. The two measures are not strictly in conflict — a country can be far below its 2010 level and still register a one-year uptick — but the list should not be read as identifying the world’s worst-performing countries on HIV.
What the figures do not settle
The reference period behind the 860 cases needs care. NewsFirst describes it as “the past year” while dating the testing and ratio data to “the fourth quarter of last year”, which points to the programme’s most recent completed reporting year rather than a rolling twelve months to October 2026. The account does not give the comparable figure for the previous year, so the size of the increase cannot be calculated from it.
It also does not say how the 7,403 total divides between people currently in care, people lost to follow-up and people who have died, or give a district breakdown, an AIDS-related death count, or the share of new cases diagnosed late.
Only NewsFirst had filed an English-language account of these figures at the time of writing. Searches of the verified Sri Lankan newsrooms returned only earlier editions of this recurring story, based on previous years’ NSACP data, which are not cited here.
