A look at where HIV/AIDS has come in the last 25 years — and where the remaining hurdles lie.
BRUSSELS — The latest antiretroviral drugs have changed an HIV/AIDS diagnosis from a guaranteed death sentence to a manageable, chronic disease. So are we winning the battle? Not yet.
For years, the world employed ad hoc measures in hopes that an effective vaccine would soon solve the crisis. Now some humanitarian aid organizations say that rather than waiting for future medical breakthroughs, there needs to be a comprehensive global strategy for preventing the disease from spreading.
Medicine alone seems unable to stem the epidemic and efforts at prevention are only reaching 10 percent of the people at risk, according to experts. The number of people undergoing treatment has increased tenfold in the last four years, but at least five new people are coming down with HIV/AIDS for every two being treated.
It is worth looking at where HIV/AIDS has come in the last 25 years — and where the remaining hurdles lie.
Until now, the world’s reaction to the epidemic has been too little too late. The disease first surfaced in a 1981 alert to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta that five gay men in California had died from pneumonia after their immune systems collapsed. By the end of the year, cases from drug addicts using infected needles had begun appearing in England.
By 1985, 17,000 cases in 71 countries were reported to the World Health Organization.
Today, the cumulative total of people infected with HIV/AIDS is nearly 60 million. At least 25 million have died. Anywhere from 2 million to 5 million cases are reported a year. The United States is still recording from 10,000 to 50,000 new cases annually despite widespread education programs.
“Initially, the big problem was across-the-board denial about the disease itself,” said Peter Piot, who until recently was the executive director of UNAIDS. “Particularly in the United States, Europe and Western countries, it was seen as a disease of shame and homosexuals.”
The hesitancy of political leaders to get involved with the illness and its potentially explosive social issues provided the time and space that AIDS needed to gain a worldwide foothold. “When I look back at how we handled AIDS, it is not that some things failed, and others worked,” Piot said. “It is that we began acting on a massive scale far too late.”
While countries dragged their feet in confronting the crisis, the disease spread across continents and beyond the marginal groups it first afflicted. In sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS is unraveling 50 years of development efforts. Some companies are hiring two executives for the same job, because they are afraid that one of the two is certain to come down with AIDS. China, which for a long time tried to deny that it had a problem, is now reporting 50,000 to 100,000 new cases a year.
There are already concerns over political instability in China, India and Russia resulting from the economic impact of AIDS.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/ngos/090330/the-state-aids
