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Best to focus on preventing :
HIV in Africa
Efforts to treat everyone in Africa infected with the AIDS virus are
virtually futile, and public health experts should instead focus on
preventing new cases, a committee of experts reported on Monday.
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The image of an AIDS patient in Africa. At least 12 million
of them will need treatment, but only seven million will
likely get those drugs, the committee of international AIDS
experts appointed by US institute of Medicine said. AP Photo |
Currently 22.5 million people in Africa have HIV, but this number
will rise to more than 30 million by 2020 - far more than can be treated
with current resources, according to the report from the US Institute of
Medicine.
At least 12 million of them will need treatment, but only seven
million will likely get those drugs, the committee of international AIDS
experts appointed by the Institute said.
"The number of people that are infected with HIV/AIDs in sub-Saharan
Africa is projected to far outstrip the available resources for
treatment by 2020," Dr Thomas Quinn of Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore and the National Institutes of Health told a news conference.
"Because treatment will only reach a fraction of those who need it
... preventing new infections should be the central tenet of any long
term response to HIV/AIDS in Africa," added Quinn, who co-chaired the
committee.
The committee's report projects that 70 million Africans will be
infected with the virus by 2050 unless something changes. Reuters |
