An HIV-infected T-cell. Researchers found that the number of infections in Denmark has decreased since 1996, when effective HIV treatments were introduced.
Worldwide, about 35 million people are living with HIV. The World Health Organization and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS plan to use an approach called “treatment as prevention” to eliminate the global pandemic, which the WHO says will have occurred when only one person out of 1,000 becomes infected each year.
Now, a nearly two-decade analysis by researchers from UCLA and Denmark yields the first proof that the approach could work.
Reviewing Danish medical records, they found that the treatment-as-prevention strategy has brought Denmark’s HIV epidemic to the brink of elimination. The study found that in 2013, the country had only 1.4 new HIV infections per 1,000 men who have sex with men, Denmark’s major risk group.
“The Danes have done what nobody else in the world has been able to do,” said Sally Blower, the study’s senior author and the director of the Center for Biomedical Modeling at UCLA. “They have almost eliminated their HIV epidemic, and they have achieved this simply by providing treatment.”
The paper notes, however, that the treatment programs in Denmark are exceptional. “Treatment makes people less infectious,” said Justin Okano, the study’s lead author and a statistician in Blower’s research group. “In Denmark, 98 percent of patients take all of their HIV medications, which is why treatment as prevention has worked there. Unfortunately, adherence levels are nowhere near as high in other countries.”