The good news and the bad news on AIDS

An international conference on AIDS has had good news and bad news.

The Fourth International Aids Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis and Treatment, in Sydney, Australia is being attended by 5,000 delegates from more than 130 countries.

In an address by Dr. Anthony Fauci, George Bush's top adviser on HIV/AIDS, delegates were told the world is losing the battle against the virus and though progress had been made, more people were being infected with HIV than were being treated.

Dr. Fauci said for every one person put on therapy, six new people get infected and the numbers game is being lost.

The meeting of the world's top HIV/AIDS experts were told by Dr. Brian Gazzard, of the British HIV Association, that currently the HIV epidemic is essentially uncontrolled in Africa and Asia.

This is regardless of the fact that 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 only 28% of the world's HIV/AIDS patients are on the anti-retroviral drugs.

The conference heard that new infections were continuing to outpace the global effort to treat and educate patients and the number of people with HIV is expected to rise from around 40 million today to 60 million by 2015.

The good news is that male circumcision can reduce the risk of HIV infection in young men by 60% and starting HIV-AIDS patients on powerful anti-retroviral drugs earlier may keep people healthier for longer.

Conference delegates heard too that experts now have a better understanding of how HIV undermines the body's defences, and this could lead to new avenues of research.

Professor Michael Lederman, director of the Centre for AIDS Research at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, said HIV's role in destroying immune cells lining the gut was now thought to play a bigger role than previously thought in accelerating the immune system's decline.

Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of the Global Fund said new drugs meant AIDS was no longer a death sentence.

AIDS has already killed 25 million people.