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.
USA
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