World conference meets in Spain to hear of new anti-AIDS measures

SPAIN: New drugs, easier ways to take them and improving access for those who need them are the issues expected to dominate …

SPAIN: New drugs, easier ways to take them and improving access for those who need them are the issues expected to dominate the 14th International AIDS conference that begins on Spain's Catalan coast tomorrow.

Scientists have not found a cure for AIDS, and there is no end in sight to the epidemic that has infected 40 million people worldwide and is still spreading.

But the 14,000 doctors, researchers, politicians and AIDS activists attending the week-long meeting will hear about novel compounds that attack the virus in a different way, the latest vaccine results, why more emphasis must be put on prevention and how money from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria should be spent.

"There are three main messages that can emerge from the conference: simplification of therapy, new families of compounds and therapeutic vaccines," said Dr Jose Gatell, a co-chairman of the conference, which is held every two years.

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Existing anti-retroviral drugs that have given AIDS sufferers a new lease of life but have been difficult to take will be simplified and better tolerated by patients.

Results on trials of two new types of drugs, fusion inhibitors and integrase inhibitors, are expected. They will complement the existing arsenal of anti-AIDS therapies.

"Having two completely new families of compounds may represent a kind of revolution in anti-retroviral therapy at the same level that the introduction of protease inhibitors represented back in 1996," said Dr Gatell.

Fusion inhibitors, designed to prevent HIV from entering cells, could be commercially available in a few months.

Integrase inhibitors, which aim to block a vital step in virus replication, are still a few years away.

But together they represent the biggest advance in drug therapy since the introduction of anti-retroviral therapy.

With no major advances expected on a preventive vaccine and so few sufferers in poor countries getting anti-AIDS drugs, emphasis on better prevention is expected to take centre-stage.

Epidemiologist Dr Jordi Casabona, Dr Gatell's co-chairman of the meeting, said the emerging AIDS epidemics in China, India, eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and growing number of cases in sub-Saharan Africa were proof that better efforts were needed to stop new infections.

East Timor's Health Minister, Mr Rui Maria de Araujo, warned in a statement published on a UN website yesterday that his newly-independent country was in danger of an AIDS epidemic, saying its low official figures were "just the tip of the iceberg". - ( AFP)