WORLD:The ongoing Aids epidemic has killed 30 million people so far and adds another 250,000 deaths a month to the toll. This is akin to the losses seen in the Indian Ocean tsunami occurring 12 times a year, according to the co-discoverer of HIV, the Aids virus.
Prof Robert Gallo this morning looks back on the 25 years which have passed since the first Aids case was reported. Writing in Student BMJ (British Medical Journal), he described the challenges of finding a preventative vaccine against the virus.
Prof Gallo and Prof Luc Montagnier, then of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, are credited with the discovery of HIV. Its isolation allowed Gallo to develop a blood test that could confirm infection and track the virus's rapid spread across the world.
"From our serological studies we knew from the start that Aids would soon be global, but no one could have possibly anticipated the great African catastrophe," he writes.
An estimated 40 million now carry the virus, a large proportion of them living in sub-Saharan Africa.
"My colleague, the epidemiologist William Blattner, likes to point out that the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 killed an estimated 230,000 people. HIV is akin to a tsunami killing more than 250,000 people every month."
It remained "impossible to predict" whether things will improve given "the epidemic is still in a dynamic state and because it is equally difficult to predict human behaviour or sustained governmental support", Prof Gallo said.
"The ultimate answer, of course, is a successful preventative vaccine."
The challenges in achieving this are "formidable", but there are reasons to hope, he added.