Global fight against AIDS gets tough

BEIJING, Aug. 5 -- About 33 million people across the world are infected with HIV that causes AIDS, and 2 million die of it each year.

Many developing countries combating AIDS are facing dire shortages of qualified doctors and nurses because they leave for developed countries where they get paid many times more.

Hitting the AIDS virus with drugs before it breaches a widely recommended threshold of damage to the immune system can have major benefits for patients.

The AIDS epidemic in the US is far worse than previously thought, the government has said, releasing new findings that show about 56,300 people are infected with HIV every year - a startling 40 percent jump from the earlier estimate of 40,000.

These findings and suggestions were issued before and at the global AIDS conference that began in Mexico City on Sunday. About 20,000 scientists, policymakers and grassroots workers will deliberate ways to check the spread of the disease.

"We need to help poor countries to train more health staff, provide commensurate salaries to enable them to live better lives and carry out their work," Moses Massaquoi, medical coordinator with Medecins Sans Frontieres in Malawi, said in Mexico City.

The dearth of medical staff leaves HIV patients untended, to die without drugs that can keep them alive and healthy even if they do not offer a cure.

Treating AIDS patients requires dedicated training, and most countries with a huge burden of the disease simply do not have enough of such professionals.

Peter Piot, executive director of the UN AIDS agency UNAIDS, corroborated Massaquoi at the conference, where international agencies, health officials, scientists, pharmaceutical companies and NGOs will over the week discuss ways to stop the epidemic.

"Three million people (globally) have access to drugs, but 6 million do not. AIDS is far from over," Piot said. "There is a need to expand treatment to those who do not yet have treatment."

The guidelines on early treatment of AIDS were published at the start of the six-day conference.

At present, under recommendations honed after antiretroviral drugs were introduced 12 years ago, doctors are generally advised to put a patient on the famous triple "cocktail" after HIV has made significant inroads into the immune system.

The threshold varies, but the typical recommendation now is to start drugs when there are fewer than 200 to 250 CD4 cells - key immune cells that are ravaged by the virus - per ml of blood because it will minimize the drugs' toxic side effects and gain time.

Officials in the U.S. said the new AIDS figures represent improved assessments and are not evidence that infection rates are going up.

But the news had AIDS advocacy groups in Chicago calling for additional funding to combat the outbreak among gay men and African-Americans, among whom cases of infection are increasing the fastest, as a study shows. Advocates called for a national strategy to combat the epidemic, too.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the findings before the start of the international AIDS convention, and said they represent a more accurate picture of an epidemic that "is worse than previously known" and show how significant the threat of HIV/AIDS remains.