"That was the lowest I felt leaving an AIDS conference," said Gayle, president and chief executive officer of CARE, the international poverty-fighting organization, and former president of the International AIDS Society. She was not the only one despondent. Dr. James W. Curran, then-director of AIDS programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, told reporters that he had left Berlin "dispirited by the restless assault of the virus."
Today, with 2.7 million new infections every year, including 56,300 - or one every 91/2 minutes - in the United States, HIV remains as restless as ever. However, delegates leaving the 18th International Conference on AIDS in Vienna on July 23 departed optimistic about the possibility of finding a cure for AIDS. They know that a cure may still be years away; the long journey to progress against this three-decades-long "restless assault" is measured in baby steps, not leaps and bounds.
"This is a scientific conference and there is a lot of great science being presented with fantastic results, which are giving us new hope for prevention, treatment and control of HIV," said Dr. Kevin Fenton, director of CDC's National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention.
By far, the most significant finding was announced by the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) and involved a microbicide, which is anything that kills microbes such as bacteria and viruses.
Researchers released a study showing that a microbicide gel containing tenofovir lowered the risk of HIV infection among women by 39 percent in one group and by 54 percent among women who used the gel more frequently. Tenofovir is an antiretroviral drug that blocks a key viral protein called reverse transcriptase; HIV needs the protein to reproduce once it has entered the cell.
