AIDS researchers started the largest ever conference on the disease yesterday with a new sense of optimism over scientific break throughs, even though the killer virus continues to rage, infecting five people every minute.
The week long 11th International Conference on AIDS in Vancouver, Canada, will be the biggest in a global series of AIDS gatherings, drawing together 15,000 researchers, people with AIDS, activists, policy makers and journalists.
"We have our first glimmers of hope in a long time," the conference co chairman, Dr Martin Schechter, said yesterday. "We are beginning to have the tools within our grasp to be able to start to chip away at this problem, if we are given the resources and commitments we need from government and people around the world."
Even before the official start of the conference, the streets, storefronts, conference halls and arts centres were filled with events ranging from homosexual film festivals to commemorations for the dead. There were forums of activists and grassroots community workers from around the world.
"We don't need another declaration. What we need is effective implementation," a group of 500 activists calling itself Community Forum 96 declared in a statement, asking that AIDS be treated as a human rights issue as well as a medical problem.
After a decade of disappointment, researchers have recently reported a flurry of major advances and their findings are expected to be the highlight of the conference. Some scientists are even daring to speculate that these gains may lead to a cure. But they emphasise that many hurdles remain, and new data released on the eve of the conference showed the killer pandemic continues to spread relentlessly.
The United Nations estimated 21.8 million people around the world are living with HIV or AIDS. About 8,500 more people are infected daily five every minute with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that is believed to cause AIDS. Since the global pandemic took hold in the early 1980s, 5.8 million people have died of the disease, which destroys the immune system.
In the United States, the Centre for Disease Control issued new statistics on Saturday that suggested the rate of AIDS infection appears to be stabilising. But it said these statistics show an unacceptably high level, with about one in 300 Americans carrying the virus.
"On a global scale, the epidemic is still out of control despite its tenuous stabilisation in the United States and in certain developed countries," said AIDS researcher, Dr Anthony Fauci of the US National Institutes of Health.
Even so, Dr Fauci and other researchers believe there is good reason for optimism. Among developments that have helped dispel despair are remarkable results from a new type of drug introduced this year. These drugs, called protease inhibitors, block an enzyme crucial to the multiplication of the virus. Tests so far have shown that when taken in multi drug "cocktails" including the medicine AZT, protease inhibitors have reduced the amount of HIV in the blood for long periods.