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Nov 26, 2008 01:10 PM | 2
Among the unresolved issues surrounding the AIDS pandemic is which strategy — pushing prevention techniques or HIV treatments — will best reduce the disease's spread. Now, World Health Organization (WHO) researchers say that annual testing and immediate drug treatment of those who test positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, could within a decade virtually eliminate new cases of AIDS in the hardest-hit countries.
The findings, published this week in The Lancet, are based on a mathematical model. They don't reflect a change in WHO's current recommendation of voluntary testing, the agency says. "This is a theoretical exercise based on mathematical modeling to stimulate discussion," Kevin de Cock, head of WHO's AIDS department, told the Washington Post.
Some 33 million people — 22 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa — are HIV-positive. About 3 million are on anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs), but almost an additional 7 million need them, and current prevention efforts — which emphasize condom use, monogamy and abstinence — "are unlikely to eliminate this disease," according to an abstract of the paper. It would cost $1 billion to $7 billion annually to add universal testing and treatment to the current mix of prevention and care plans, the scientists say.
The New York Times reports today that the lives of 365,000 AIDS victims in South Africa may have been spared if the government there had provided life-extending drugs to patients and medicines to pregnant women to prevent them from passing HIV to their babies. The Times cites a study by scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health, which blames the deaths on the administration of former President Thabo Mbeki, who denied that HIV causes AIDS and that the widely used medications work against the disease.
The calculations are based on how many HIV-positive South Africans were given ARVs between 2000 and 2005, and how many could have gotten them if Mbeki's government had enacted an effective treatment program. Nearly 19 percent of the country's population, or 5.5 million people, is HIV-positive, according to the study.
The government's position was “a case of bad, or even evil, public health,” study author and virologist Max Essex told the Times. A PDF of the study is posted on the Web site of the school's AIDS initiative and will be published next month in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
An Mbeki spokesperson told the newspaper that the former president wouldn’t comment on the study's conclusions.
Check out ScientificAmerican.com's in-depth report on AIDS on Monday.
HIV-positive woman in Khayelitsha township outside Cape Town, South Africa by Trevor Samson/World Bank via Flickr
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retrovirus,
drugs,
AIDS,
antiretroviral,
Africa,
HIV
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2 Comments
Add CommentWhy hasn't Scientific American covered the scientific experiment that proved that AIDS is caused by HIV? Oh, that's right, because there has never been one. Please explain that, editors.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"If there is evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There is no such document."
Dr. Kary Mullis, Biochemist, 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
"Up to today there is actually no single scientifically really convincing evidence for the existence of HIV. Not even once such a retrovirus has been isolated and purified by the methods of classical virology."
Dr. Heinz Ludwig Sanger, Emeritus Professor of Molecular Biology and Virology, Max-Planck-Institutes for Biochemy, Munchen.
Another good skeptic on this issue is Dr. Peter Duesberg, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Why aren't any of these voices being heard? If some people are not killed by HIV, which is the case, then shouldn't this billion-dollar AIDS pharmaceutical industry be in question?
Hey Shamandale, you sir are wrong: http://aids.about.com/od/advocatelinks/a/denial.htm
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"the denialist believes that there is really no proof that HIV causes AIDS - if HIV even exists at all. In 1993, Dr. Kary Mullis, a biochemist who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry contended that if HIV causes AIDS there should be scientific documents that demonstrate that fact. According to Mullis there is no such document. Ironically, he was awarded his Nobel Prize for his work with the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) method, a test that today is commonly used to identify HIV in blood specimens."
"Peter Duesberg, Ph.D., a researcher in the fields of molecular and cell biology, believes the HIV causes AIDS theory fails to meet the cardinal rules of virology [the science of viruses] and therefore the theory is flawed and untrue.
Conventional theory is, however, able to prove a connection between HIV and AIDS. The denialist contention that HIV does not cause AIDS is flawed from the very start. The denialist questions a direct cause-and-effect relationship, meaning if you have HIV, the virus will cause those illnesses that are AIDS defining.
In fact, conventional HIV theory doesn't contend that at all. Conventional theory says that HIV damages the immune system that in turn puts the body at risk for AIDS defining illnesses. Some may say that this is a game of semantics, but it is that misinterpretation of HIV conventional theory that denialists use as one of the foundations of their cause."
"Many denialists, such as virologist Dr. Heinz Ludwig Sanger, believe that the scientific techniques used to determine the existence of HIV and its connection to AIDS is at least flawed and most likely irresponsible. Denialists such as Sanger contend there is no convincing evidence that HIV has ever been isolated and identified using established techniques of research.
Others, like Dr. Serge Lang, feel the statistics used to prove the conventional HIV theory are highly improper and are a product of media hype being passed off as science.
But some estimates report that over 100,000 research papers were published proving the HIV conventional theory by the year 2000. Hundreds of scientists devote thousands of hours proving and refining HIV science, yet denialist say all of them are wrong. There are electron micrographs of HIV particles available across the Internet.
As for statistical evidence, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and every state in the U.S. has surveillance numbers