More Drugs sooner is always good Prevention? if condoms are prevention also where in this article is the break down of the cost of producing and disturbing them? OR just basic cost of education?
Modeling done by scientists shows that combining HIV prevention methods—including the use of condoms, male circumcision, medicines to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child, and putting more infected people on AIDS drugs—can lead to a sharp drop in the number of new HIV infections.
Modeling done by scientists shows that combining HIV prevention methods—including the use of condoms, male circumcision, medicines to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child, and putting more infected people on AIDS drugs—can lead to a sharp drop in the number of new HIV infections.
By BETSY MCKAY - WSJ.com
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to call Tuesday for a new push by the U.S. and other countries to harness recent science to stem the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Government researchers believe science has now developed sufficient tools to contain the pandemic, which erupted 30 years ago, has infected more than 60 million people and has been linked to the deaths of about 30 million. HIV infects about 2.6 million people a year.
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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
In a speech to be delivered at the National Institutes of Health, Mrs. Clinton is expected to call for those tools to be widely implemented in countries where the pandemic continues to rage, and to ask donors to step up aid to intensify the response, according to people briefed on the speech.
Modeling done by scientists shows that combining HIV prevention methods—including the use of condoms, male circumcision, medicines to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child, and putting more infected people on AIDS drugs—can lead to a sharp drop in the number of new HIV infections.
The plan is the result of months of analysis and discussions following the publication of a landmark study in May showing that AIDS drugs, known as antiretrovirals, can not only restore HIV-infected people to health but also make them far less infectious. Those put on treatment early in their infection were at least 96% less likely to transmit the virus to their sexual partners than those who started on drugs later. The drugs sharply suppress the amount of HIV in the body, leaving less to transmit.
About 5.2 million people were receiving treatment in 2009, the latest year for which global data are available, of more than 15 million who needed drugs, according to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, or UNAIDS.
Any scale-up in prevention efforts will require new funding, but the global economic crisis has slowed donations. Governments' contributions to the fight against AIDS dropped 9.7% in 2010, to $6.9 billion, from $7.6 billion in 2009, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation and UNAIDS. U.S. funding for global AIDS programs for fiscal 2011, including the U.S. contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, was about $28 million less than for fiscal 2010. The U.S. is the world's largest AIDS donor.
Both the House and the Senate are considering appropriations for global health, including for HIV/AIDS, that are below President Barack Obama's request for fiscal 2012. That could mean a slight reduction in funding from fiscal 2011, said Jennifer Kates, director of Global Health and HIV Policy at Kaiser.
Paul Zeitz, vice president of policy for Act V: The End of AIDS, an awareness and advocacy organization, said the Obama administration must expand targets for the number of people to put on treatment, protect U.S. funding for a successful program and corral global support. "We have to step up, but the world has to step up. We have this extraordinary opportunity if we work together," he said.
While funding has declined, U.S. officials say they have cut the costs of drugs and delivery. The U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief spent $440 on treatment and care for each patient in 2010, 57% less than the $1,050 spent per person in 2004, when the program launched, John Blandford, an economist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's global AIDS program, said in a recent interview. The savings come from a shift to generic drugs, reaping the benefits of initial investments in health systems, and supply chain efficiencies, he said. More than 3.2 million people were receiving treatment through the U.S. program as of September 2010.
AIDS care programs are also likely to pay for themselves in developing countries through increased labor productivity and averted orphan and patient care costs, according to a study published last month in the open-access journal PLoS ONE. The authors found the return on investment from $14.2 billion spent on 3.5 million patients on treatment would be between $12 billion and $34 billion between 2011 and 2020.
The most likely economic gain over that time period would be between $20 billion and $25 billion, based on the best information available on how AIDS treatment restores worker productivity and on other factors, said Robert Hecht, a managing director at the Results for Development Institute in Washington and a co-author of the study. The study was done before the research was published showing how strongly early access to AIDS drugs can prevent transmission, a finding that could raise returns, he said.
"We intend to keep working on this," he said. "We want to factor in the preventive effect."
Write to Betsy McKay at betsy.mckay@wsj.com
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