WHO recommends earlier HIV drugs to save lives

PanARMENIAN.Net - Doctors could save three million more lives worldwide by 2025 if they offer AIDS drugs to people with HIV much sooner after they test positive for the virus, the World Health Organization said on Sunday, June 30, according to Reuters.

While better access to cheap generic AIDS drugs means many more people are now getting treatment, health workers, particularly in poor countries with limited health budgets, currently tend to wait until the infection has progressed.

But in new guidelines aimed at controlling and eventually reducing the global AIDS epidemic, the UN health agency said some 26 million HIV-positive people - or around 80 percent of all those with the virus - should be getting drug treatment.

The guidelines, which set a global standard for when people with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) should start antiretroviral treatment, were drawn up after numerous studies found that treating HIV patients earlier can keep them healthy for many years and also lowers the amount of virus in the blood, significantly cutting their risk of infecting someone else.

"We are raising the bar to 26 million people," said Gottfried Hirnschall, the WHO's HIV/AIDS department director. "And this is not only about keeping people healthy and alive but also about blocking further transmission of HIV."

Some 34 million people worldwide have the HIV virus that causes AIDS and the vast majority of them live in poor and developing countries. Sub-Saharan Africa is by far the worst affected region.

But the epidemic - which has killed 25 million people in the 30 years since HIV was first discovered - is showing some signs of being turned around. The United Nations AIDS program UNAIDS says deaths from the disease fell to 1.7 million in 2011, down from a peak of 2.3 million in 2005 and from 1.8 million in 2010.

Swift progress has also been made in getting more HIV patients into treatment, with 9.7 million people getting life-saving AIDS drugs in 2012, up from just 300,000 people a decade earlier, according to latest WHO data also published on Sunday.

Margaret Chan, the WHO's director general, said the dramatic improvement in access to HIV treatment raised the prospect of the world one day being able to beat the disease.

"With nearly 10 million people now on antiretroviral therapy, we see that such prospects - unthinkable just a few years ago - can now fuel the momentum needed to push the HIV epidemic into irreversible decline," she said in a statement.