Gates says protective creams could prove Aids turning point
Published: August 14, 2006
Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 65 million people have been infected with HIV and Aids has killed more than 25 million people.
In sub-Saharan Africa, where 64 percent of all HIV patients live, more women are infected than men. Most children who are infected catch the virus from their mothers as newborns.
“We’d be happy to have that gel,” Maria Nkosi, a grandmother from Nkomazi region in South Africa, said through a translator at the conference. “Men are men and they don’t like to use condoms, especially married men who refuse to wear a condom with their wives. This would offer women some protection from HIV/Aids.”
Also attending the conference are Bill Clinton, the former US president, as well as international Aids experts such as Dr. Peter Piot, a microbiologist and founder of UNAids, and Stephen Lewis, the U.N. envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa.
Mr Piot said the toughest job in HIV prevention was to make older men change their behaviour, especially men who have multiple partners, then pass on HIV to their wives, girlfriends or boyfriends throuigh unprotected sex.
“The future of this epidemic is in our hands,” he said. “As long as we don’t change our behaviour and put girls and women at risk, again, it’s not going to work.
“Tragically, the end of Aids is nowhere in sight,” he said.
Mr Gates, who recently announced he would step down from his day-to-day duties at Microsoft so he could devote more time to philanthropy, said the amount of money needed to ensure universal treatment “far exceeds the amount any individual government or foundation can provide”.
Another speaker, Catherine DeAngelis, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, summed up the loss of life caused by the disease.”The Aids epidemic now matches the bubonic plague,” she said.
Jonathan Weber, a professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College London, has been involved in the trials of one of the microbicidals in Africa which he has been working on for ten years.
“I began working on an HIV vaccine 20 years ago now and it was clear it wasn’t going to be a very easy vaccine. We looked around for other things we could do with what we had and it seemed getting this [microbicidal] on the market would be quicker,” he said.
“There has been immense enthusiasm from women in Africa - this is something they can use even if their partner won’t use a condom. Negotiating condom use can be a very difficult issue and there’s no doubt that this would be greeted with massive enthusiasm. There’s nothing else out there that would represent a woman-controlled method.”
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