Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Newsday - February 25, 2002
Laurie Garrett, Staff Correspondent
The CDC's Dr. Harold Jaffe released the estimates yesterday at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, a meeting of scientists and physicians involved in AIDS research.
"We have reached a plateau in both AIDS cases and deaths in the United States," Jaffe said. "I think this is largely due to the remarkable number of people not coming in for AIDS tests."
Surveys show that HIV-infected Americans who use anti-virus medication survive longer, steadily increasing the number of people living with HIV. The number of Americans who die of AIDS annually has remained for the last three years at about 3 of every 100 HIV- positive Americans.
Those deaths, Jaffe argued, are primarily a result of the fact that "there's still a lot of people out there who are infected who are not accepting the health care system at all."
The conference this week will devote attention to the African epidemic. Last night's keynote speaker was Microsoft's Bill Gates, whose foundation has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to fighting AIDS in Africa Gates spoke to the inequities in the availability and production of AIDS drugs, noting that nearly all medications are produced for and distributed to "the rich world."
He said: "So here you get to what has to be the biggest market failure of all time ... When the market doesn't work it needs government resources - huge resources - in the tens of billions of dollars." Noting that the U.S. government subsidizes medical research, he said the same level of support is appropriate for the "poor world" on fighting AIDS. Gates announced that his father, Bill Gates Sr., who is president of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will travel to Africa next week on a fact-finding mission with former president Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalyn.
One concern raised last night by Dr. Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama in Birmingham is the exposure of Africans to forms of the disease found in chimps, called the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus. In Tanzania's Gombe chimpanzee reserve, run by primatologist Jane Goodall, Hahn found four out of 49 chimps were SIV-positive. None were sick. Indeed, something appears to protect chimpanzees, as so far no chimp exhibits symptoms of AIDS despite SIV infections, Hahn said.
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