Are we about to eliminate AIDS?

Are we about to elim­in­ate AIDS? — New Sci­ent­ist:

Some­what mis­lead­ing title — the article’s more to do with how AIDS could be elim­in­ated. And it requires massive world­wide test­ing and imme­di­ate and con­tinual anti-retrovirals for those test­ing pos­it­ive for HIV.

It’s a simple idea, but the obstacles to imple­ment­ing it world­wide are enorm­ous. Per­suad­ing every­one with HIV to start ther­apy purely for pub­lic health reas­ons could be eth­ic­ally dubi­ous. To identify every­one who is HIV pos­it­ive would require such wide­spread test­ing that some may feel it breached their civil liber­ties. Then there is the ques­tion of who would fund such a massive undertaking.

Yet the idea of elim­in­at­ing HIV is so appeal­ing, and the bene­fit to human­ity so huge, that sci­ent­ists and policy-makers are ser­i­ously con­sid­er­ing the concept, albeit on regional scales. In the next few months the World Health Organ­iz­a­tion (WHO) will meet to dis­cuss how the idea could be tried in devel­op­ing coun­tries, and some­thing approach­ing elim­in­a­tion might be attemp­ted in the UK within the next dec­ade. “You could elim­in­ate trans­mis­sion overnight,” says Mar­cus Con­ant, an HIV spe­cial­ist in San Francisco.

Inter­est­ing pos­sib­il­ity, none the less.