From dark days to a critical turning point in the AIDS epidemic: The landscape has changed dramatically in the two decades since the world’s largest AIDS conference last met in the United States.
Back in 1990, the first good medicines were still a few years away. Before they arrived, caring for patients with HIV was like “putting Band-Aids on hemorrhages,” said the leading U.S. AIDS researcher, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Fast forward: Today’s anti-AIDS drugs work so well they not only give people with HIV a near-normal life expectancy, they offer a double whammy — making those patients less likely to infect other people.
The International AIDS Conference opened Sunday with a call for governments not to let tight budgets roll back progress against the epidemic.
The conference’s goal is to turn the tide on HIV. Experts say science has provided tools to finally stem the spread of this intractable virus.
San Francisco AIDS specialist Dr. Diane Havlir said it would be “an extraordinary failure of global will and conscience” if financial cutbacks block this chance.
She said the world has a chance to “start to end AIDS.”
“There is no excuse, scientifically, to say we cannot do it,” Fauci, infectious disease chief at the National Institutes of Health, told reporters Sunday.
But the challenge that more than 20,000 scientists, doctors, people living with HIV and policymakers will grapple with this week is how to get to what the Obama administration calls an AIDS-free generation. Where’s the money? What works best in different countries and cultures?
And with HIV increasingly an epidemic of the poor and the marginalized, will countries find the will to invest in the most vulnerable?
“Rich countries think, ‘Who cares? We have the treatment, I hear now that HIV is a chronic condition,’ ” a worried Nobel laureate Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, co-discoverer of HIV, told The Associated Press. “I really think there is not the same political commitment as it was in the past.”
That political commitment must expand to fight laws that are driving some of the populations most at risk — gay and bisexual men, sex workers and injecting drug users — away from programs that could help protect them from getting or spreading HIV, said Michel Sidibe, director of UNAIDS, the United Nations AIDS program.
“It’s outrageous that in 2012, when we have everything to beat this epidemic, that we still have to fight prejudice, stigma, exclusion,” he said.
People living with HIV marched through downtown Washington Sunday to urge the public and policymakers to pay attention to a disease that, in this country, doesn’t get much publicity anymore.
“We’re everyday people. Anybody and everybody can catch this,” said Ann Dixon, who traveled from Arkansas to attend the march. She learned she had HIV in 1997.
The AIDS conference — remarkable for giving a forum not just to leading scientists but to everyday people who live with HIV — hasn’t returned to the U.S. since 1990, in protest of the longtime ban on people with the virus entering the country.
The Obama administration lifted the travel ban in 2010, finishing a process begun under the Bush administration.