HIV is overwhelmingly a disease of young people — those under the age of 24 — and women, South Africa’s national Aids conference heard on Monday.
Rodney Hoff of the US National Institutes of Health noted that in 2002 there was an average of 14 000 new HIV infections in the world each day. Of these more than 95% were in developing nations and more than half of the infected were women.
Speaking at the Durban Convention Centre, Hoff said, ”About 12 000 infections each day are in persons aged 15- to 49 years old, and half of those infections are in people aged 15- to 24 years old.
”Two thousand daily infections are in children under 15 years of age.”
He noted that the use of anti-retroviral (ARV) therapy had dramatically reduced the number of babies infected by mothers in the USA. Before ARVs were used, pre-1994, a quarter of babies born to HIV-infected mothers contracted HIV.
In the two years following that, to 1996, with single or dual drug therapy (AZT is most often used in the USA) four- to eight percent of babies were born infected with HIV. At present, the USA uses triple therapy to prevent HIV infection in babies. From 1997 to 2001 only one to two percent of babies in the USA born to HIV-infected mothers contracted HIV, Hoff said.
”Approximately 1 200 perinatal infections were prevented in 2000.”
Hoff said increasing attention was being paid to the prevention of HIV in women and girls, 2004 will be the international year of combating HIV in women.
He said there was a ”renewed global effort to develop protections that women can use.”
He said that in topical microbicides — gels being developed that prevent HIV in women — good progress was being made.
Anti-retroviral drugs were increasingly being used for prevention in three main risk groups:
Post exposure prophylaxis (PEP) for high risk occupational and nonoccupational exposure (such as needlestick injuries among medical staff or rape)
Pre-exposure prophylaxis of high risk groups (for example, haemophiliacs)
HAART therapy to reduce sexual transmission among discordant couples (where one partner is HIV-positive and the other negative).
Hoff said that global challenges included increasing access to ARVs, developing successful HIV vaccines and increasing global preventative mechanisms.
In the meantime, the Democratic Alliance (DA) has launched an appeal against the health department’s failure to meet its request for the release of the Antenatal HIV Prevalence Study for 2002.
They said the data, which is usually released in April each year, had not been issued.
The DA lodged an initial request for it to be made public in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act on 3 July 2003. The 30-day deadline to provide the information expired this past weekend.
Mike Waters of the DA said: ”Denial is one of the driving forces behind the Aids epidemic; government has resorted to operate in a secretive ‘cover-up’ fashion.”
The annual survey is the only measurement compiled by the government tracing the progression of HIV infections in South Africa, and is an important indicator of the success of the government’s attempts to control the disease. – Sapa