AIDS is not over

Four years ago optimism was high that AIDS was in retreat, and could ultimately be eradicated. Back then the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) was boldly predicting "the end of AIDS by 2030." Nobody is feeling so optimistic now.

New HIV infections, after dropping steadily for the ten years to 2005, more or less stabilized at 2 million a year in the last decade, and the annual death toll from AIDS has also stabilized, at about 1.5 million a year.

But the future looks grimmer than the present.

Two-thirds of all HIV-positive people (24 out of 36 million) are in Africa, and an even higher proportion of the AIDS deaths happen there. If it were not for Africa, the predictions of four years ago would still sound plausible. So what's wrong with Africa? Two things: It is poor, and there are "cultural practices" that facilitate the spread of the HIV virus.
 
The great achievement of the International AIDS Conference that was held in Durban sixteen years ago was to break the grip of the big pharmaceutical companies on the key drugs that were already making HIV-positive status a lifelong nuisance rather than a death sentence in other parts of the world. Unfortunately, the drugs were so expensive that the vast majority of Africans simply could not afford them - so they died instead.

In a diplomatic and media battle that lasted for almost a decade in the late 1990s and early 2000s, African countries managed to shame the big pharmaceutical countries into accepting the importation of much cheaper "generic" versions of the main anti-retroviral drugs, mainly from Brazil, India and Thailand, for use in poor African countries.

The Western drug companies not only dropped their collective lawsuit against the South...