News BBC
23 July 2007
Source"
US President George W Bush's top adviser on HIV/Aids has said the world is losing the battle against the virus."
Dr Anthony Fauci told a conference in Sydney that progress had been made, but more people were being infected with HIV than were being treated.
"For every one person that you put in therapy, six new people get infected. So we're losing that game, the numbers game," he said.
Dr Fauci was speaking at a gathering of the world's leading HIV/Aids experts.
Last year, 2.2 million people in the developing world had access to the anti-retroviral drugs that help treat the virus, compared with less than 300,000 people three years ago.
But new infections were continuing to outpace the global effort to treat and educate patients, the conference heard.
Delegates were encouraged by findings that male circumcision can reduce the risk of HIV infection in young men by 60%.
The study, based on trials in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa, forecast that male circumcision would prevent 5.7 million new cases of HIV infection over 20 years in sub-Saharan Africa.
"We've had one important breakthrough this year, with understanding the role of circumcision in prevention," said Dr Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
"We need to do more of that and importantly, we need to make available to the people throughout the world the prevention methods that are proven technologies."
But in many parts of the developing world, effective prevention strategies like condoms and sterile syringes are available to less than 15% of the population.
EpidemicDr Fauci's warning at the Fourth International Aids Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis and Treatment was echoed by other experts.
Dr Brian Gazzard, of the British HIV Association, said that despite greater access to anti-retroviral drugs, the disease was running out of control in parts of Asia and Africa.
"The HIV epidemic is essentially uncontrolled, uncontrolled in Africa, uncontrolled completely in Asia right now," he said.
The Australian conference's 5,000 delegates are drawn from more than 130 countries.