Category: HIV/AIDS News

The Kaiser Family Foundation is reporting live from the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna Austria, which is going on now. Below is a video. After an introduction, Bill Gates starts speaking about ‘Building on Success: A Roadmap for HIV Prevention’ at 8:00 minutes.

During his presentation, he speaks about preventing mother to child transmission saying that ‘we can eliminate pediatric AIDS’. The entire video is 48 minutes long and covers lots of different HIV/AIDS topics, so those who are primarily interested in the section of the video regarding pediatric HIV/AIDS and prevention may want to forward the video to start watching at 38:15. At this point is a Q & A with Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation president Chip Lyons and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation co-chair Bill Gates. The highlight: Lyons asked Gates what we could do to step up our efforts to prevent new pediatric infections, and how we could move closer to eliminating altogether HIV and AIDS in children.

“It’s outrageous that we haven’t done better on [eliminating HIV and AIDS in children],” Gates answered. “We need to get countries to set aggressive goals. We need to get the political leaders to recognize the tragedy that this is.”

He added that he was “horrified” that only 45 percent of women currently had access to PMTCT services.

“In terms of cost of the intervention, the impact on the lives involved, that should be something that we have above 90 percent. This is one where, even in the next year, I’d like to see a big change.”

He expressed optimism that this goal was entirely reachable, and acknowledged Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation’s pivotal role in making this happen.

A while back I had posted about this BBC report which stated that antiretroviral therapy (ARV/ART) medications make HIV positive people become “close to non-infectious”. It also stated that “early detection and treatment would prevent transmission”. This new article Study Confirms That Antiretroviral Therapy Significantly Cuts Risk of HIV Transmission states that HIV positive individuals who used antiretroviral therapy reduced the risk of transmitting HIV to their uninfected partners by 92 percent. I find these studies interesting because it is increasingly clear that medicated individuals  are hardly a risk to people they are engaging in risky behaviors with. Therefore, they are absolutely not a risk to people with whom they are not having sex with, nor sharing needles with. The point is that the people who are spreading HIV are people who do not know they have it (and are therefore not taking medication) and people who unfortunately do not have access to the medication (in resource poor settings).

Thanks to Suzan at Red Ribbon Diaries for this video update on the search for a cure for HIV.

This BBC report is about using ARVs to stop the spread of AIDS. In it, Dr. Brian Williams, a leading figure in the field of HIV research is sited:

Speaking at at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, he said 30 million people around the world were infected with HIV – with two million dying each year.

“The tragedy is that the disease continues unabated. The only real success story is the development of these extremely effective drugs that keep people alive and reduce their viral load by up to 2,000 times. They become close to non-infectious.

I make note of this because people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States are given ARV meds so that their viral loads become ‘undetectable’. In other words, there is VERY little of the HIV virus in their bloodstream. This report is claiming that an undetectable state is close to a non-infectious state. If you read between the lines, Dr. Williams does not even mention the use of condoms – he mentions the use of ARVs to stop the spread of the virus. [I could go into a discussion about that, but this post is about the article itself.]

This is the second time I have heard the word ‘non-infectious’ being used. The first time being the Swiss study which says that HIV-positive individuals on effective antiretroviral therapy and without sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are sexually non-infectious.

However, separate research (last paragraph) showed that 10% of men with an undetectable blood viral load had “significant” viral load in their semen which they said meant that HIV could be detected, but were unable to say if potentially infectious quantities of the virus were present.