An AIDS-free generation: It seems an audacious goal, considering how the HIV epidemic still is raging around the world.
Yet more than 20,000
international HIV researchers and activists will gather in the U.S.
capital later this month with a sense of optimism not seen in many years
— hope that it finally may be possible to dramatically stem the spread
of the AIDS virus.
“We want to make sure we don’t overpromise,”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health’s infectious
disease chief, told The Associated Press. But, he said, “I think we are
at a turning point.”
The big new focus is on trying to get more
people with HIV treated early, when they’re first infected, instead of
waiting until they’re weakened or sick, as the world largely has done
until now. Staying healthier also makes them less likely to infect
others.
That’s a tall order. But studies over the past two years
have shown what Fauci calls “striking, sometimes breathtaking results,”
in preventing people at high risk of HIV from getting it in some of the
hardest-hit countries, using this treatment-as-prevention and some other
protections.
Now, as the International AIDS Conference returns to
the U.S. for the first time in 22 years, the question is whether the
world will come up with the money and the know-how to put the best
combinations of protections into practice, for AIDS-ravaged poor
countries and hot spots in developed nations as well.
“We have the
tools to make it happen,” said Dr. Elly Katabira, president of the
International AIDS Society, which organizes the world’s largest HIV
conference, set for July 22-27. He points to strides already in Botswana
and Rwanda in increasing access to AIDS drugs.
But Fauci
cautioned that moving those tools into everyday life is “a daunting
challenge,” given the cost of medications and the difficulty in getting
people to take them for years despite poverty and other competing health
and social problems.
In the U.S., part of that challenge is
complacency. Despite 50,000 new HIV infections here every year, an
AP-GfK poll finds that very few people in the United States worry about
getting the virus.
Also, HIV increasingly is an epidemic of the
poor, minorities and urban areas such as the District of Columbia, where
the rate of infection rivals some developing countries. The conference
will spotlight this city’s aggressive steps to fight back: A massive
effort to find the undiagnosed, with routine testing in some hospitals,
testing vans that roam the streets, even free tests at a Department of
Motor Vehicles office, and then rapidly getting those patients into
care.
“These are the true champions,” Dr. Mohammed Akhter,
director of the city’s health department, said of patients who
faithfully take their medication. “They’re also protecting their
community.”
