Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Wall Street Journal - July 5, 2002
Gautam Naik, Staff Reporter
The study, published Friday in the British journal Lancet, was conducted between 1990 and 1999 in 15 neighboring villages in Uganda. It found that HIV incidence, or the number of new HIV cases, was 37% lower in the second half of the decade than in the first half. Between 1990 and 1999, the rate of HIV prevalence, or the number of cases in the population, also fell significantly, especially for high-risk groups such as men aged 20 to 24 years and women aged 13 to 24 years. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.
"It shows that the fight against AIDS can be won, and that it's being done without low-cost drugs," says James Whitworth, director of an AIDS program in Uganda sponsored by Britain's Medical Research Council and lead author of the paper.
According to the study, the overall rate of adult HIV prevalence in Uganda has dropped to 5% at the end of last year from 8.3% in 1999. Uganda's apparent secret: A mass government-led education campaign that has embraced all kinds of organizations at virtually every level of society.
Health workers there routinely screen blood donations, and the government, under a special program with the private sector, makes condoms available for as little as 10 U.S. cents apiece. Its education program also encourages people to limit their number of sexual partners and otherwise change high-risk sexual behavior. And it has enlisted a variety of nongovernmental organizations in the fight against AIDS, ranging from the Islamic Medical Association to Christian advocacy groups.
The study comes on the eve of a major AIDS meeting in Barcelona, Spain, and just as a new United Nations report warns that the AIDS epidemic, far from leveling off in hard-hit countries as some had hoped, is worsening.
Unless prevention and treatment measures are vastly improved, AIDS could kill 68 million people in the 45 most affected countries over the next two decades, according to the report published this week by the Joint U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS, or UNAIDS. By comparison, 13 million people in those countries succumbed to the disease in the previous two decades. About half a million people have died of AIDS in Uganda, one of the first countries devastated by the epidemic.
Programs similar to Uganda's are helping other countries make headway. According to UNAIDS, Zambia could become the second African country to curtail the spread of AIDS: HIV prevalence there among young women living in cities fell to 24% in 1999 from 28% in 1996. Among young rural Zambian women, the figure dropped to 12% from 16% in the same period.
Still, in many places, including India, China, Eastern Europe and Russia, the AIDS epidemic is expected to explode in coming years. Another huge problem: Getting inexpensively priced AIDS medicines to infected people in poor countries.
According to the new UNAIDS report, some six million people in the developing world need AIDS treatments, but only 230,000, or less than 4%, were getting them at the end of last year. In Africa, of the 28.5 million infected with HIV, some 30,000 were receiving antiretroviral medicines against the AIDS virus. Last year, AIDS killed an estimated 2.2 million Africans.
Write to Gautam Naik at gautam.naik@wsj.com
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