Health chief hopeful of finding Aids cure

Thirty years into the Aids epidemic, a cure remains elusive but a growing arsenal of drugs could someday help end new infections, the World Health Organisation’s HIV/Aids chief says.

The key is figuring out how to best manage the latest advances, Gottfried Hirnschall said in Washington last week ahead of the International Aids Conference that begins there on Jul 22.

Anti-retroviral drugs may reduce the risk of infected people passing on the virus, and may prevent healthy people from becoming infected through sex with HIV-positive partners, but the new possibilities have also stirred controversy.

Still, these medications saved about 700,000 lives worldwide in 2010 alone, which experts described as an extraordinary accomplishment.

Research breakthroughs and progress in some countries “demonstrate that it is possible to really advance significantly in scaling up the response and even start to think about eliminating new infections”, Hirnschall said.

The world now has 26 anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs on the market and more in the pipeline for treating people with the HIV virus, which has infected 60m people and killed 25m since the epidemic first emerged.

“We have a fairly large arsenal of drugs available,” Hirnschall said, noting that the drugs are better now than they used to be, but are still not perfect.

Side effects remain a concern, and officials are monitoring the emergence of resistance, with the WHO set to release its first global report on drug resistance in low and middle income countries tomorrow.

Recent studies have shown the potential benefits of starting treatment early.

Research on using ARVs as a way to prevent HIV in healthy people has shown conflicting results, with some promise seen in studies on heterosexual couples and gay men who took the pills faithfully.

However, one major study of African women failed to show any protection from ARVs compared to a placebo and had to be stopped early.

“We see this as probably being a central conversation at the conference — the appropriate initiation for treatment and also how to best take advantage of anti-retrovirals for prevention more broadly speaking,” Hirnschall said.