SEPTEMBER 1998

NUMBER ONE

Keep the Faith
Welcome to the first issue of HIV PLUS, a quarterly magazine devoted to covering broad developments in HIV research and treatment. Our goal is to provide news, regular updates, and overviews of leading ideas and trends in HIV care, science, medicine, and policy in an easy-to-read, practical-to-use format. Whether you're a person with HIV, a physician or care provider, a bench scientist, a public official, or an HIV activist, we know how hard it is to stay on top of the news. Even the experts have trouble keeping track of the big picture, never mind the details. Despite so many new drugs and new treatment strategies, HIV remains a fast-moving target, one that continues to elude our best efforts to completely wipe it out.

KNOWLEDGE = POWER goes the slogan of ACT UP, the AIDS activist group. It's our hope that HIV Plus will serve as a tool you can read, share, copy, send to friends and colleagues, or hang on your wall to consult. In these pages, we've included news from the recent World AIDS Conference in Geneva; charts of updated treatment guidelines; the skinny on emerging treatments and strategies to overcome drug failure, drug toxicity, and drug resistance; plus information for women, children, and drug users with special treatment concerns. We've also looked ahead at emerging therapies and technologies that will add to the current arsenal of anti-HIV weapons.

On a personal note, I've been covering the AIDS epidemic since 1985. In that time period, HIV has become the greatest modern threat to human survival, one that now rivals the biggest plagues in history, an epidemic whose destruction is sometimes hard to appreciate from the United States. The future of the world is literally at stake in Asia and Africa, where there are no good treatments and few prevention dollars to slow the spread of AIDS. The latest statistics are mind-boggling: In some cities in Africa, one in four adults are now infected, while the virus is taking off in Southeast Asia, Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

As never before, we urgently need a vaccine against HIV, but the news in Geneva was disappointing. We also desperately need to develop an alternative to condoms to protect women-a fast-growing group at risk for HIV around the world. For now, the virus is staying a step ahead of us, evolving into mutant drug-resistant strains that are spreading in humans and may limit the effectiveness of current HIV drugs.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the human mind and will are powerful tools against this virus. In Geneva, the big focus was not on eradication of HIV but remission-a new treatment goal that has refocused our attention onto the immune system and its potential to control the virus. Several studies show us that's a realistic goal, one already transforming our overall ap-proach to HIV treatment.

The virus is still a Pandora's box: Every time we step ahead, new worlds are revealed, new obstacles and new directions. But that is true of all diseases. Looking at the big picture, what I see is that we humans, like HIV, are adapting to survive. And every day, the picture gets a little clearer. So keep the faith.

ANNE-CHRISTINE D'ADESKY
EDITOR IN CHIEF

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