Macleans.ca | Top Stories | Health | How to wipe out AIDS in 45 years

Macleans.ca | Top Stories | Health | How to wipe out AIDS in 45 years: "Dr. Julio Montaner, the Argentinian-born director of the internationally acclaimed B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS and president-elect of the International AIDS Society, doesn't exactly think small. On Aug. 4, The Lancet published a paper in which Montaner and his colleagues outline a theory to eradicate the global spread of HIV within 4 1/2 decades. And it has nothing to do with condoms, abstinence or free needle exchanges.

The Lancet paper, ambitiously entitled 'The case for expanding access to highly active anti-retroviral therapy [HAART] to curb the growth of the HIV epidemic,' contends that HAART -- which suppresses the number of copies of a virus in an infected individual -- is responsible for the reduction and stabilization of HIV infection rates in the developed world, and that aggressively expanding its use could effectively halt the spread of the virus in its tracks. Furthermore, Montaner maintains that implementing such a strategy, which he acknowledges would cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars, is not only good health policy but cost-effective as well."