TORONTO, Aug 14, 2006 (AFP) - A senior world AIDS expert Monday urged community doctors to crank up testing for the killer virus, bemoaning the "appalling" fact that nine in ten HIV carriers don't know they are infected.
Kevin De Cock, director of the World Health Organisation (WHO) department of HIV/AIDS, told AFP that empowering physicians to test patients could help check the spread of the disease which has already killed 25 million people.
"Only ten percent of people living with HIV in the world are aware of their HIV status," De Cock said on the sidelines of the 16th International AIDS conference in Canada.
"That's appalling. We have to scale up the traditional ways of knowledge, in other words voluntary counselling and testing ... we need innovative ways of doing it."
De Cock said the WHO could not accept that patients were flocking to health centers across the world, but were not being tested for HIV or AIDS.
"We will talk about provider-initiated testing and counselling."
Health officials have long worried carriers of the virus cannot heed calls to take personal responsibility to stop its murderous march across continents, if they don't even know they have the virus.
But officials acknowledge that some people who might suspect they are infected are unwilling to take AIDS tests, fearing discrimination, stigma and an erosion of their own basic rights in often developing societies.
De Cock argued that even as new antiretrovial treatments become more widely available and billions of dollars were poured into the anti-AIDS fight, prevention of new infections remained vital.
"Prevention has to be at the center of our response. We're not going to solve this epidemic just by scaling up treatment," he said.
"We have to provide prevention advice and service to people living with HIV. HIV is transmitted by people living with HIV. We've hardly focused on HIV-infected people at all. We need to do that."
Globally, 12 percent of people who want testing have access to it.
In the adult population, 0.1 percent have taken a test in South and Southeast Asia, compared to 0.2 percent in North America.
The figures are marginally better in Sub Saharan Africa, the region worst blighted by the murderous passage of AIDS, at 2.2 percent.
Another priority for the WHO, is to tackle the terrible problem of HIV and AIDS transmission between mothers and babies -- which though mostly eradicated in the West, is still rampant in the developing world.
"The whole issue of prevention of mother to child transmission is not exclusively an African one but very largely, because such a large proportion of women with HIV are African," De Cock said.
In sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS caused 6.5 percent of deaths of infants younger than five years old in 2003. One infected child in two never reaches the age of two years. Fewer than one pregnant mother in ten gets the treatment which can prevent the transmission of the virus to the baby.
"Every child born with HIV is an illustration of several failures," De Cock said.
"It's the failure of the prevention of HIV infections in young girls and young women, of unwanted pregnancy or pregnancy in an HIV-infected young woman, and the failure of delivery of services to prevent mother-to-child transmission itself."
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