AIDS tsunami: 200,000 people are killed by HIV/AIDS every month - most of them in Africa.
Credit: iStockphoto
Dangerously incomplete
This work still remains dangerously incomplete.
In China, India and the countries of the former Soviet Union, the peril remains of the virus leaping from niches of infection among drug users, homosexuals and prostitutes to a mainstream epidemic.
Even more culpable was the horrific wait, of nearly a decade, before antiretroviral drugs started to fall sharply in price and become available to sub-Saharan Africa, where two-thirds of people with HIV or AIDS live.
Price is no longer the big problem. Political denial and lack of infrastructure to distribute the precious drugs are.
"In Africa, not even 10 per cent of the people who need treatment are getting it," says Schwartz, noting that for every person in low- or mid-income countries who began receiving antiretrovirals in 2006, six new people became infected.
The U.N. Millennium Goals and G8 pledges testify that political commitment on AIDS is strong and that the world is now aware that novel infectious diseases are everyone's problem. No country, however strong or secure its borders, is secure.
"AIDS may never disappear"
Billions of dollars are being marshalled by the Global Fund, and the United States, under President George W. Bush, has boosted its spending on AIDS emphatically.
But to meet the goal of universal access to AIDS treatment and care by 2010 would require a quadrupling of funds to an estimated 42 billion U.S. dollars annually, if overhauling healthcare systems is included, according to some estimates.
Today, the terror of AIDS that prevailed 25 years ago has disappeared; but so has the burning optimism (see, AIDS pandemic marks quarter century, Cosmos Online).
"I would have preferred to celebrate the anniversary of the end of the epidemic than of the publication" of the isolation of the virus, said Montagnier.
Lars Kallings, a Swedish microbiologist who is the founding president of the International AIDS Society, gives a bleak assessment: "HIV/AIDS may never disappear from mankind."
Richard Ingham is a writer in Paris, France, with the AFP news agency.
