Hopeful Global News About AIDS

The world has some reason to be hopeful about our ability to contain and stabilize the global AIDS epidemic.

US News and World Report writes that expanded access to antiretrovial drugs is producing a potentially unknown benefit of reducing the number of new AIDS cases. Forty-two percent of people in the developing world who carry HIV had access to antiretroviral medicines at the end of 2008.

The 2.9 million of sub-Saharan Africa’s infected population was receiving treatment, representing a tenfold increase over the past five years.

“I think this has come about through a number of organizations that have been trying to get drugs to be available to people in the developing world,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He especially credited the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), begun under the second Bush presidency, which he said “is responsible for over 2 million people being on therapy.”

Both the Clinton and Gates Foundations have helped to broker price-reduction schemes with pharma companies for a much less expensive distribution of AIDs drugs in poor nations.

The side-effect story here is the possibility that as antiretroviral drugs stabilize AIDS in patients, the reduced viral loads in already infected people is lowering the probability of transmitting the disease to others.

The UN recently reported that AIDS has stabilized globally the past two years and may actually have peaked in the late 1990s.

More reading: Vatican-US Partnership Fighting Against AIDS ZENIT