A report released in Geneva by UNAIDS revealed that HIV prevalence among young people has declined by more than 25 percent in 15 of the 25 countries most affected by AIDS. This is largely because of less risky sexual behavior among the youth in countries like Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
"Young people are taking the lead," UNAIDS chief Michel Sidibe said. He named the new objectives in combating AIDS as "zero new HIV infection, zero discrimination, zero AIDS-related death," but said "current treatment strategy is not enough to reach our goals."
Denis Farrell, AP
The United Nations' AIDS agency says its new plan, called Treatment 2.0, could prevent 10 million AIDS-related deaths by 2025. Here, a woman walks past HIV+ written upside-down on a wall in Johannesburg on World AIDS Day 2009.
His agency laid out the new approach, Treatment 2.0, which Sidibe called a "game changer" consisting of five "pillars."
The first is to create a better pill and diagnostics. In today's treatment regimens, infected individuals have to take multiple pills every day to stop the virus from reproducing.
But the heavy dosages that need to be consumed cause severe side effects and often leave people unable to afford the second stage of treatment, which is necessary to keep the virus in check.
The U.N. wants to see multiple drugs consolidated into a single pill that would have fewer side effects and be less toxic. "A one-pill, once a day anti-retroviral therapy has been shown to improve both adherence and quality of life while maintaining the same efficacy," the report said, noting that such a pill would also remove the need for a second or third line of treatment.
The study also underlined the need to produce simpler and cheaper diagnostic tools that don't require complicated lab work and can yield results within a few hours.
The second pillar of the U.N. plan advocates "treatment as prevention," with a focus on stopping the transmission of the virus from mother to child and between couples. The report found that providing anti-retroviral treatment to everyone who needs it could reduce new HIV infections by as much as one-third annually. A recent study provided anti-retroviral drugs to the infected partner in each of 3,400 couples in sub-Saharan Africa, and found that such treatment reduced transmission rates by 92 percent.
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