An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or so the saying goes. That line of thinking has driven AIDS policy in the developing world for almost a generation now: clinics around the globe have dispensed untold millions of free condoms and have counseled hordes of people about how to change their behavior to reduce the risk of HIV infection.

Such prevention efforts--which tend to be less expensive than offering life-prolonging drugs to already infected individuals--have indeed helped stabilize or reduce the incidence of new HIV infections in various countries, most notably Uganda and Thailand. But the time has come for the developed world to acknowledge that prevention alone is not enough to battle AIDS in developing nations.

This article was originally published with the title Treat AIDS Globally.

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