Addressing the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, one of the leading HIV researchers Dr Brian Williams, of the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis in Stellenbosch, said that anti-retroviral (ARV) treatments might prevent the spread of AIDS in South Africa in the next five-year period.
Elaborating that the ARVs reduce the amount of virus that the sufferers of the disease have in their body fluids, Williams said that the treatment had already brought about a notable transformation in the care AIDS patients.
Further adding that ARV drugs are already being administered to babies born to HIV-infected women, immediately after birth and during breast-feeding, to minimize the chances of infection, Williams said: “We should be looking at using the drugs to reduce transmission.”
Noting that the scale of AIDS in South Africa was “enormous,” Williams said that by providing HIV positive patients with ARV drugs can help stall the spread of the disease at an annual cost of nearly $2-3 billion.
With Williams specifying that some clinical trials pertaining to ARV drugs were being initiated in North America and in Africa, Kenneth Mayer, professor of medicine at Rhode Island’s Brown University, corroborated the fact that early ARV treatment of AIDS patients was a matter of “public health.”
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