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From 'gay plague' to global tragedy: An AIDS anniversary
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-05-19 11:15 They provided an arsenal of drugs that, with the advent of the triple "cocktail" of antiretrovirals in the mid-1990s, have helped turn HIV from a death sentence to a manageable disease. But there is still no vaccine, for the virus has turned out to be an unimaginably slippery, mutating foe -- quite possibly the most elusive pathogen to have emerged in human history. Attempts to make an HIV-thwarting vaginal gel, or microbicide, have been similarly frustrating. Thus, in the 21st century, the main shield against HIV is the rubber condom, invented in the 19th century -- or sexual abstention, which is timeless. Then there was catastrophic delay, among politicians, policymakers, religious leaders and the public too, about rooting out the taboo, stigma, myth and complacency in which AIDS proliferates. This work still remains dangerously incomplete. Even more culpable was the horrific wait, of nearly a decade, before antiretrovirals started to fall sharply in price and become available to sub-Saharan Africa, where two-thirds of people with HIV or AIDS live. Price is no longer the big problem. Political denial and lack of infrastructure to distribute the precious drugs are. "In Africa, not even 10 percent of the people who need treatment are getting it," says Schwartz, noting that for every person in low- or mid-income countries who began receiving antiretrovirals in 2006, six new people became infected. The UN Millennium Goals and G8 pledges testify that political commitment on AIDS is strong and that the world is now aware that novel infectious diseases are everyone's problem. No country, however strong or secure its borders, is secure. Billions of dollars are being marshalled by the Global Fund, and the United States, under President George W. Bush, has boosted its spending on AIDS emphatically. But to meet the goal of universal access to AIDS treatment and care by 2010 would require a quadrupling of funds to an estimated 42 billion dollars annually, if overhauling healthcare systems is included, according to some estimates. Today, the terror of AIDS that prevailed 25 years ago has disappeared -- but so has the burning optimism. "I would have preferred to celebrate the anniversary of the end of the epidemic than of the publication" of the isolation of the virus, Montagnier told AFP. Lars Kallings, a Swedish microbiologist who is the founding president of the International AIDS Society, gives a bleak assessment: "HIV/AIDS may never disappear from mankind." |
