Do not let your guard down in the fight against AIDS

It is that, according to experts, in some countries the number of infections with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has increased significantly and it is suspected that these indicators are related To the reduction of financial contributions for the campaigns of For specialists, moreover, the progress made to develop a treatment that treats AIDS have made that so much importance is not given to basic prevention. The researcher and founder of UNAIDS agency Peter Piot warned that the reduction of new infections worldwide over the past decade has been, on the one hand, a very positive advance in public health, but on the other hand this fact has generated excess optimism among some scientists who have not hesitated to point out that the world is very close to eliminating AIDS.

Piot warns that, in reality, there is no evidence to support this claim and notes that this argument, a "dangerous complacency" in the face of the threat. More than 15,000 representatives of agencies and non-governmental organizations are expected to attend the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam, which is launched today and will be extended. all week long.

At this meeting, scientists from different countries will badyze the latest advances made in laboratories to obtain a more effective and simpler medicine against the virus. Experts say that although more than three decades have pbaded since investigations began to find a solution to this serious scourge, until now it has failed to cure the virus, which has infected nearly 80 million people. Since the beginning of the epidemic in the early 1980s, 35 million people have been killed.

According to data from a recent report of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV / AIDS, better known as UNAIDS, 36.9 million people were infected with the virus in 2017; who, thanks to antiretroviral therapy (ART), does not mean a death sentence. The same report states that there was also the lowest annual death rate in two decades (940,000) and a record number of people with access to treatment (21.7 million).

However, the work warns that infections are increasing in 50 countries, more than double in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In this sense, the President of the International AIDS Society (IAS), Linda-Gail Bekker, warned that the scientific community could have made a "strategic mistake" by focusing on treatment over prevention. Which is ultimately the only way to stop the outbreak while a vaccine is not reached.

According to Onusida, $ 7 billion more per year is needed to achieve the UN goal of no longer posing a threat to AIDS. public health by 2030. To achieve this goal, new infections and AIDS-related deaths are expected to be reduced by 90% compared to 2010.

In the current global scenario, specialists like Bekker believe that broad sectors of the population they could have fallen into a false optimism that led to abandoning "too early" the fight against HIV / AIDS. It is necessary that health systems and society in general do not reduce their efforts to combat a scourge that continues to be a threat, because if prevention is abandoned, infections could increase again, leading to a new infection. epidemic.