‘Hearing less about AIDS does not mean it has gone away’

THE lower public profile of HIV does not mean it has gone away, a health expert warned yesterday.

Around 350 people were diagnosed with the virus, which leads to the development of AIDS, in Ireland last year.

The head of the UCD School of Medicine, Professor William Powderly, said HIV was still a significant threat to people’s lives.

“There is a tendency for people to believe that because they don’t hear about it as much, that HIV and AIDS has gone away and it’s not a problem,” he said. “The issue is that it’s not gone away, it continues to be a problem. The good news is that people are living but we’re still seeing many new cases.”

Mr Powderly is one of the experts attending the 10th European AIDS Conference at UCD today. Its brief is to examine the recent developments in HIV medicine, clinical trails and antiretroviral therapy.

“Ireland is perhaps a little luckier than other parts of Europe. The numbers are increasing dramatically in Eastern Europe in particular in the last five years because of intravenous drug use.”

There are around 4,000 people who are being treated here for HIV/AIDS, with foreign nationals from Africa accounting for an increasing number of cases.

Mr Powderly said heterosexuals now accounted for the largest number of new HIV/AIDS cases.

“If you look at the Irish epidemic right now, people who identify themselves as heterosexuals are more common than homosexuals and part of that is drug use. Not only does a drug user pass HIV to another person by sharing needles, but they also can pass it to another person, their sexual partner.”

The Health Research Board has provided a €1 million grant to UCD and Trinity College Dublin to carry out medical research on AIDS treatment in Ireland over the next five years.

Mr Powderly said specialists were pessimistic about the prospect of discovering a cure for HIV/AIDS in the near future but added that the prospects for treatment were much better.

“Treatment works and the most important thing is to identify people and get them into treatment early. The fact is that AIDS has changed from being an inevitably fatal disease to one where the vast majority of people live relatively normal lives.”

However, there is concern among specialists about the growing resistance of HIV/AIDS to common drugs, which makes treatment much more difficult.