'Aids epidemic only starting'
2005-07-28 09:42
Special Report
The South African government has announced a joint venture to reduce the cost of anti-retroviral drugs with a Swiss company.
Rio de Janeiro - With a record five million new cases of HIV last year and major new outbreaks in Central Asia and China, the epidemic's impact is only now becoming fully apparent, a top United Nations official said on Wednesday.
"It's still an emerging epidemic. Just now we're getting into the globalisation phase," said Dr Peter Piot, executive director of the UN programme of HIV/Aids (Unaids). "Globalisation isn't just for profits and markets it is also for Aids."
Piot said the disease was also undergoing "feminism" transforming itself from a disease that once largely affected gay males into a disease that has infected a roughly equal number of women and men around the world. In Southern Africa, about 60% of those infected are female.
Hopes for a vaccine are remote
And while Unaids estimates the amount of money devoted to fighting the disease has increased 35 fold since 1996 to about $8bn this year alone, there is little reason for optimism.
Piot was in Rio to address the third International Aids Society conference on HIV pathogenesis and treatment which ends on Wednesday.
Some 5 000 scientists, doctors, health professionals and public policy specialists from around the world, were able to document only incremental progress in the fight against Aids.
About 60 million people have been infected with HIV since the epidemic began and there are an estimated 39 million living with the disease today.
Scientists said hopes for a vaccine in the near future remained remote and no one could predict how soon new classes of drugs that could fight resistant strains of Aids would reach the market. The HI virus was discovered almost 25 years ago.
Record number of new infections
"There is no one magic bullet, what we need is a tool kit," said Helene Gayle, the president of the International Aids Society. "There were five million new infections last year, more than any previous year and yet only one in five people have access to prevention information and services."
According to Unaids, only one in 10 gay men and one in six sex workers have been reached by prevention programs.
The situation is especially worrisome in Central Asia where a new outbreak is being fuelled by cheap heroin flowing out of Afghanistan.
Another area of concern is China, where a policy of re-injecting blood donors with plasma to allow them to donate more frequently has infected hundreds of thousands of people.
Despite the gloomy outlook, more people than ever are receiving antiretroviral medications.
This year, about one million people in the developing world were receiving antiretroviral medications up from between 250 000 to 300 000 the year before, Piot said.
- AP