Culture Shock: End of HIV/AIDS Still Not in Sight

published on August 15, 2016 by Michael Smith , in MEDPAGE TODAY

If you interview a cab driver -- a time-honored resort for the harried journalist -- you get the impression that it's all pretty much over. I asked a couple about HIV while I was Durban, South Africa for the International AIDS Conference (IAC).

They were aware of the issue -- there was a conference, after all, with its attendant traffic issues -- but they thought things were under control and that there was likely to be a cure soon, if there wasn't already.

And in the developed world, HIV/AIDS has been off the radar for a while. A friend of mine, a recently retired reporter, was puzzled when I told him I had been at the IAC. "Do they still have those?" he asked.

Well, yes, they do. An AIDS-free generation is a slogan, not a reality. "It ain't over 'til it's over," in the words of that eminent "clinician," Yogi Berra (Well, he healed the '73 Mets, didn't he?).

AIDS Today

The 2016 Durban conference came 20 years after highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) was shown to halt HIV progression and 16 years after the first AIDS conference here, which turned the spotlight on getting HAART to people in the developing world.

So what does the HIV/AIDS pandemic look like today, from the perspective of scientists and clinicians who lived through those years? And what challenges does the world face in the next few years?

Sensing that reliable information was unlikely to come from cabbies, I posed those questions to several top experts.

Uniformly, they told me -- using words like "amazing" and "magnificent" -- that medical science has made enormous strides in treatment and prevention in the past 20 years, developing tools that have the potential to stop HIV in its tracks.

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Culture Shock: End of HIV/AIDS Still Not in Sight

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