Miami Herald - February 25, 2005
Fred Tasker, ftasker@herald.com

Mankind and its scientists are at a stalemate with AIDS -- winning some battles, losing others -- in a long-term battle that won't end soon, Dr. Robert C. Gallo said in Miami on Thursday.

"We're often asked to compare AIDS to the great epidemics of the past, like the plague or influenza," said Gallo, the scientist who codiscovered that HIV was the virus that causes AIDS. "These conventional viruses and bacteria came swiftly and went swiftly, like a great tornado.

"AIDS is like a chronic thunderstorm that won't go away," Gallo said. "It will be a problem for our children and our children's children unless we can solve it through potent education and getting the drugs out there."

Worldwide, many areas are losing the AIDS fight, said Gallo, who spoke at the 31st annual Eastern Atlantic Student Research Forum at the University of Miami Medical School.

"It's significant and rising in Asia, Russia and countries around Russia. It is devastating in much of Africa."

In 2004, 39.4 million people worldwide had HIV/AIDS, up from 39 million a year earlier, according to the United Nations Joint Program on HIV/AIDS.

"In the industrialized nations, including Europe and the United States, it remains relatively stable but still unpredictable," Gallo said.

INCREASING AGAIN

Both HIV and AIDS, which declined sharply after powerful antiretroviral drugs were introduced in the mid-1990s, have begun inching up since 2001, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

"Anti-HIV drugs were a godsend for HIV-infected people," Gallo said. "But they led to overconfidence and cavalier behavior."

Recently, concerns have arisen that patients who have had HIV for 15 years or more, and who have been on anti-HIV drugs, are experiencing relapses as the virus develops resistance to the drugs, he said.

"So far in the industrialized world, science is on top of it," he said. "It doesn't mean we're winning. We're about even."

Good news, however, comes from a class of anti-HIV drugs that were introduced at the XIV International AIDS Conference in Barcelona in 2002. Called "entry inhibitors," they fight HIV by keeping it from entering healthy cells. Older drugs fought HIV mostly by keeping it from reproducing once it was inside the healthy cells.

"The entry inhibitors introduced in Barcelona were only the beginning," he said, "and they're not even the most interesting. There are new drugs coming along that will be even better."

Anti-HIV drugs probably will never cure AIDS; AIDS will be stopped only when there is an effective vaccine to prevent it, Gallo noted. But an effective vaccine is three to five years away, he said.

LESS FUNDING

In Washington on Thursday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health, expressed concern that U.S. funding for AIDS vaccine research may be tightening.

After years of big budget increases in the 1990s, he said, the NIH next year expects its total budget to increase just one-half of 1 percent, he told The Associated Press.

On another AIDS topic, Gallo rejected as "utter nonsense" the way health officials and some members of the media have handled the case of a New York man found two weeks ago to have a strain of HIV that is resistant to three of the four classes of drugs used to treat HIV.

His infection had grown from HIV to AIDS quickly, the officials said. He was HIV-negative in May 2003, HIV positive by November 2004 and had AIDS by January 2005.

The officials called the case "a wake-up call" to men who have sex with men, particularly those using crystal meth, the drug used in the New York case.

Some members of the media quickly dubbed the virus a "Super Virus." But some gay groups have complained they were being unfairly singled out.

Gallo called the situation an overreaction.

"It's only in one individual, and it's known to be poorly transmissible. There's no evidence he has infected anybody."

CHEAPER TREATMENT

In other developments Thursday, researchers at an AIDS conference in Boston reported that a relatively inexpensive combination of HIV drugs could reduce mother-to-baby transmission rates in Africa far more effectively than the single pill now used.

Scientists have long been searching for an alternative to nevirapine, the AIDS drug now widely used in the Third World, because two-thirds of women become resistant to it.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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