Little cause for celebration on silver anniversary of AIDS

Only 25 years into the AIDS epidemic, and an estimated 25 million people have died. On the 50th anniversary, it is likely that the disease will have claimed more lives than any epidemic in the history of mankind.
Those are sobering -- no, frightening -- numbers, and yet, they could have been much worse.
In some ways, the fight against AIDS has been a success story -- at least in the developing nations where the disease was first recognized. But there are few signs of success in Third World nations.
It was 25 years ago today that Dr. Michael Gottlieb, an immunologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, published a scientific paper in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report describing a rare pneumonia in five gay men.
While the disease was initially reported in gay men, by the time the Centers for Disease Control gave it a name a year later, it was clear that intravenous drug users and boys being treated for hemophilia were also among its primary victims. Today it reaches across gender and lifestyle barriers.
In the United States, CDC statistics show rates of new infections have been dropping from 150,000 confirmed infections a year in the 1980s to about 40,000 annually in recent years. That's about 1 percent of the 4.1 million people who became infected last year. Nearly three out of four of those victims live in Africa.
But the disease has the potential for killing tens of millions in the immense populations of India and China, where it is taking hold in poor, rural populations.
Other killers
AIDS has the potential to easily exceed the estimated toll of 34 million from the Black Death in 14th century Europe or the 20 to 40 million who died in the 1918 influenza epidemic.
Twenty-five years ago, a diagnosis of AIDS was taken as a death sentence, and for those early victims it was. But during the last decade, regimens of drug cocktails have made AIDS a treatable disease for many patients in the United States and Europe.
But for the poor at home and abroad -- those who do not have access to the necessary drugs or lifestyles that accommodate the demands of taking the different drugs on a regular schedule -- the disease remains a vicious killer.
For most of the 1,400 people who are infected everyday -- many of them the children of infected mothers -- there is little hope.
In the United States, only 300 children are born each year with HIV infection, compared with 2,000 annually in the mid-1990s. Such a dramatic success story will not be seen in underdeveloped nations for a long time.
Efforts must continue worldwide to find better methods of treatment, to develop the vaccine that has confounded scientists and to educate men and women on how to avoid contracting the disease.
Gottlieb estimates that there could be 150 million people infected by the 50-year mark. Only continued efforts to conquer the disease on every possible front will keep that prediction from being realized.