Everyone is looking forward to a vaccine

"When I was born with HIV twenty years ago, the landscape of HIV and AIDS was very different from what it is today." Mercy Ngulube began a brief conversation at the first AIDS 2018 press conference this week. in Amsterdam. Beautiful, it progresses, she says. She is grateful, but "we are still far from the targets set for 2020 and 2030. If we continue as now, as Tedros has just said, we will not achieve these goals."

Tedros, c? Is the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Ghebreyesus, who has recently turned to the hundred or so journalists who had wrestled in the hall before the conference Press. The 22nd International AIDS Conference, now biennial, attracts this year 15,000 participants to RAI Amsterdam. True to tradition, it is a mix of researchers, public health experts, policy makers, interest groups and action groups of people living with HIV.

Ghebreyesus expressed the problem concisely: the goal is to treat 30 million people infected with HIV by 2020 with antiviral drugs. Now there are 21 million. So nine million more people need to be helped in HIV drugs in three years. "It's hard to say if we're getting that, we're behind, we have to be aggressive," said the boss of the WHO.

United Nations Member States want AIDS no longer a threat to public health by 2030. This is one of the many goals of sustainable development ( Sustainable Development Goals ) of joint United Nations organizations.

Unaids, the United Nations organization for the fight against HIV and AIDS, designed the goal "90-90-90" for this. This means that by 2020, 90% of people infected with HIV know that they have HIV. They must have been tested. HIV is mainly transmitted by people who do not know their HIV status. People who know that they live with HIV in their bodies usually prefer to be more careful. The second "90" in 90-90-90 indicates that 90 percent of people with HIV-diagnosed virus suppressors take it. This is what is called ART therapy. And the third "90" means that the virus is no longer detectable in more than 90% of people taking antiretroviral drugs. Even if these people have unprotected sex, the odds are almost zero that they infect their sexual partner.

Most Western countries have 90- 90-90 goal already reached. The first African countries follow. The problems remain. In the Netherlands, migrants from Asia and southern Africa are asking for help relatively late. Their immune system is already measurably affected by the virus, or they even have AIDS.

This AIDS conference pays particular attention to the rapid emergence of an emerging HIV epidemic in the former Soviet Union, primarily among injecting drug users. And for HIV-positive young people – that's why the 20-year-old British Mercy Ngulube has had a prominent place – and for minority groups.

They had a heart under the Ghebreyesus belt. The 90-90-90 goals, he said, should never lead to minorities that fit easily into the remaining 10%. HIV care must be accessible to all, "without financial barriers, wherever they live and no matter how they live, these goals must be achievable for all." He said: migrants, refugees, sex workers, addicts and everyone LGBT. community

World AIDS Conferences began in 1985 as a scientific congress. AIDS was discovered in the early 1980s as a disease among gay men in San Francisco. At the first conferences, scientific discussions were disrupted by activists who wanted to have the life-prolonging drugs that the researchers talked about more quickly. And they had to be tested first before being available for everyone. Nowadays, there is more conviviality. Tradition has it that the entire HIV / AIDS community is represented.

And science? Everyone is watching labs where an HIV vaccine should arrive. Healing is difficult because HIV is very well hidden in the cells of the body and there, sleeping, inaccessible for drugs. "The cure is still far away," said Peter Reiss, AIDS professor at the UMC of Amsterdam and chairman of the scientific committee of the congress. The same thing applies to an HIV vaccine, which everyone calls a necessary part of the AIDS solution.