There’s new optimism about stemming spread of AIDS virus

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

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 nation’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 costs of medications and 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 few people in the U.S. 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 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.”

About 34 million people worldwide have HIV, including almost 1.2 million Americans. It’s a very different epidemic from the last time the International AIDS Conference came to the United States, in 1990. Life-saving drugs emerged a few years later, turning HIV from a death sentence into a manageable chronic disease for people and countries that can afford the medications.

Yet for all the improvements in HIV treatment, the rate of new infections in the U.S. has held steady for about a decade. About 1 in 5 Americans with HIV don’t know they have it, more than 200,000 people who unwittingly can spread the virus.