W. David Hardy, MD, adjunct professor of medicine, Johns Hopkins University, discusses the importance of identifying patients with undiagnosed HIV and preventing new infections for accomplishing President Trump’s plan to end the HIV epidemic in 10 years.
Transcript
During the State of the Union, President Trump announced the ambitious plan for ending the HIV epidemic in 10 years. What efforts are needed for this to be accomplished?
I’m glad you asked that question about the State of the Union address, because it was the entire reason I watched the address by President Trump last week. It was monumental that a president who has not had much interest in HIV actually said something very, very important. I think to really be clear about this, it’s important to state that while he said ending the epidemic, what we really are able to do and is going to be done, hopefully in the next 10 years, is stop new transmissions, meaning that we will decrease by 90% the number of new individuals who become HIV positive, which will be a huge step in the right direction.
The 2 tools we have for doing that are identification of people who are HIV positive and rapidly getting them on treatment to bring their viral load down. And as we talked about before, when U = U, transmission doesn’t occur, so we actually get a double benefit when we treat someone. They do better, they live longer, and they can’t transmit the virus. So that’s one thing we have to do-test more people, get them on medication, and keep them in medication for the long term.