via Nature News, by Erika Check Hayden
Preventing the spread of HIV used to mean testing people for infection and encouraging them to practise safe sex. Increasingly, it also means prescribing drugs, as studies show that giving infected people or their uninfected partners antiretroviral drugs as soon as an infection is diagnosed can help to check the spread of AIDS.
Yet at this week’s annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle, Washington, there was growing concern that financial austerity in the United States and elsewhere is eating away at the funding needed for a worldwide prevention effort.
Many scientists and advocates agree that there is now an “awesome possibility to prevent the spread of HIV”, says Sharonann Lynch, HIV policy adviser for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders) in New York. “If we decrease the money invested in treatment now, we are squandering the best opportunity we’re going to have to get ahead of the wave of new infections.”
Last month, US President Barack Obama’s 2013 budget request proposed a 10.8% cut to direct international aid for HIV programmes under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) which, together with previous cuts, would slice more than US$1 billion from the fund’s 2010 level (see ‘Sliding support’). And last November, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said that it would not hand out any more funds for scaling up AIDS treatments until 2014 because of tightening budgets in donor countries (see Nature 480,159–160; 2011).
The shortfalls come as a slew of results presented this week reinforce a growing consensus about the power of early treatment for HIV infections. The latest data are part of a trend that accelerated last May, when HPTN 052, a clinical trial run by the multinational HIV Prevention Trials Network, showed that giving antiretroviral drugs to people who are HIV-positive can stop them from passing the virus to their uninfected partners (M. S. Cohen et al. N. Engl. J. Med. 365, 493-505; 2011). In light of such results, the World Health Organization is expected to issue new guidelines for managing HIV in couples soon.
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[If an item is not written by an IRMA member, it should not be construed that IRMA has taken a position on the article's content, whether in support or in opposition.]
Preventing the spread of HIV used to mean testing people for infection and encouraging them to practise safe sex. Increasingly, it also means prescribing drugs, as studies show that giving infected people or their uninfected partners antiretroviral drugs as soon as an infection is diagnosed can help to check the spread of AIDS.Yet at this week’s annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle, Washington, there was growing concern that financial austerity in the United States and elsewhere is eating away at the funding needed for a worldwide prevention effort.
Many scientists and advocates agree that there is now an “awesome possibility to prevent the spread of HIV”, says Sharonann Lynch, HIV policy adviser for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders) in New York. “If we decrease the money invested in treatment now, we are squandering the best opportunity we’re going to have to get ahead of the wave of new infections.”
Last month, US President Barack Obama’s 2013 budget request proposed a 10.8% cut to direct international aid for HIV programmes under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) which, together with previous cuts, would slice more than US$1 billion from the fund’s 2010 level (see ‘Sliding support’). And last November, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said that it would not hand out any more funds for scaling up AIDS treatments until 2014 because of tightening budgets in donor countries (see Nature 480,159–160; 2011).
The shortfalls come as a slew of results presented this week reinforce a growing consensus about the power of early treatment for HIV infections. The latest data are part of a trend that accelerated last May, when HPTN 052, a clinical trial run by the multinational HIV Prevention Trials Network, showed that giving antiretroviral drugs to people who are HIV-positive can stop them from passing the virus to their uninfected partners (M. S. Cohen et al. N. Engl. J. Med. 365, 493-505; 2011). In light of such results, the World Health Organization is expected to issue new guidelines for managing HIV in couples soon.
Read the Rest.
[If an item is not written by an IRMA member, it should not be construed that IRMA has taken a position on the article's content, whether in support or in opposition.]
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