INTERVIEW: Leader of world AIDS group stresses advances in research

Mexico City - Research on HIV/AIDS has made great advances that extend to general medicine, the president of the International AIDS Society said in an interview. 'No other disease has spread with such speed,' Pedro Cahn told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa on Tuesday. 'But throughout history there has also been no other disease for which knowledge has been acquired so unusually quickly.' Just two years after the first recorded case, HIV - the virus that causes AIDS - was identified, noted Cahn, an Argentinian doctor who is co-chairing the 17th International AIDS Conference that has brought 25,000 doctors, researchers, activists and politicians to Mexico City this week. In contrast, the identification of syphilis took 500 years, he said. By the mid-1980s the first medicine was developed to control the virus' impact. Today there are 25 drugs to treat the disease. 'I would say that in the therapeutic treatments there have been remarkable advances,' Cahn said. 'Also in virology and in the understanding of how the immune system functions we have made great advances that can be applied to medicine in general.' Unlike other experts, Cahn is convinced that the development of new drugs will not slow down. In just the last 18 months, three new drugs from three separate companies have come on the market, he said. But he harshly criticized the lack of access of many patients in poor nations to the expensive drug treatments. Of the 33 million people infected with HIV, only 31 per cent are being treated. 'The rest continue to become sick and die like in the days when these medicines did not exist,' Cahn said, stressing that governments must address the issue of access to antiretroviral drugs. While advances in drug therapy have helped to extend the lives of the world's 33 million people living with HIV/AIDS, there has been frustration in the hunt for an elusive vaccine. On Tuesday, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative called for a new blueprint in the vaccine search that would involve setting of smaller, interim goals and following bolder research that could raise objections from regulators. In July, Dr Anthony Fauci, the man whose US government institute controls about 80 per cent of the money spent worldwide on vaccine research and testing, called for a turn back to the laboratory and away from expansive and expensive human trials that had held out so much hope in the past two years. Before the 2006 conference in Toronto, hopes soared for two unconventional vaccines - the private Merck pharmaceuticals vaccine as well as the US institute's own PAVE vaccine, which was very similar to the Merck substance - as they headed into expanded clinical trials on human beings. But Merck dropped testing in September 2007, and Fauci pulled the plug on the PAVE trials in mid July. The Merck vaccine was found ineffective, and in fact appeared to have inadvertently increased the HIV infection rate.