Beating HIV/AIDS: Treatment or Prevention?

Jul 23rd, 2007 2:30 PM UTC
By Porter McConnell, ONE Policy and Coalition Coordinator

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and a top advisor to President George W. Bush, warned a conference in Sydney, Australia this weekend that the world “is losing the fight against AIDS.”

“For every one person that you put in therapy, six new people get infected,” he alerted the group of 5,000 experts from 133 countries around the globe in attendance at the Fourth International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis and Treatment.

Even though the number of HIV patients being treated with anti-retroviral drugs has soared from fewer than 300,000 three years go to nearly 2.2 million in 2006, so many new cases are on the rise that still only 28% of the infected are receiving medication.

More staggering, however, is the WHO’s disclosure that “in many parts of the developing world, effective prevention strategies like condoms and sterile syringes are available to less than 15% of the population.”
As AIDS continues to spread at an exponential rate, treatment alone will not contain its growth in developing countries. In response to the growing imbalance, the so-called Sydney Declaration calls upon developed nations to halt the growth of the disease at its source by devoting at least 10% of spending on HIV programs toward research and development.

In addition to vaccine research, Fauci recommends allocating a higher percentage of funds on prevention: “although we are making major improvements in the access to drugs, clearly prevention must be addressed in a very forceful way.” The most successful tools of prevention – condoms, sterile syringes – are not reaching the people who need them most.

Sources:

-BBC: World ‘losing fight against Aids’
-New York Times: New HIV Infections Outpace Treatment

TAGS: The ONE Blog