AIDS Meeting Hears Bad News on Treatments, Infections; No Cure Lies in Existing Therapy

Delegates at the opening of the 14th International AIDS Conference in Barcelona got a tough dose of reality Monday. They were told that: HIV/AIDS can never be cured by existing therapies; the virus is hitting young people the hardest around the world, with nearly one-third of all people living with the virus today between ages 15 and 24; and the average life expectancy in 51 countries, mostly in Africa but also Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, will drop within a decade because of the AIDS pandemic.

A sobering assessment of current drug therapy was delivered by Dr. Robert Siliciano, an AIDS researcher from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who said that even in patients in whom the virus has been suppressed by drugs to below-detectable levels, the body still has a "latent reservoir" for HIV that "guarantees lifetime persistence of the virus and makes the disease intrinsically incurable with antiretroviral therapy alone. I realize this conclusion is a hard one to hear. But I think it's a disservice to persons living with HIV to ignore what the science is telling us." Still, Siliciano offered hope, saying the same science is revealing that antiretroviral drug cocktails are able, under optimum circumstances, to "completely stop virus evolution, making permanent suppression possible."

Malaysian human rights worker Dr. Irene Fernandez berated the central institutions of the developed world -- the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, the G8 nations, and the World Health Organization -- accusing them of failing to live up to even the inadequate promises made over the years. She also criticized the United States and other nations for mobilizing more money and effort to fight terrorism after the World Trade Center attacks than to fight HIV/AIDS. "Tell me why so much value was given to those 3,000 lives while so little thought and political will for the millions dying of AIDS?" Fernandez said.

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