World AIDS treatment program meets goal -- two years late
The aim to have 3 million treated in developing countries by 2005 was 'excessively aspirational,' one expert says. In 2007, 1 million people started taking life-saving drugs, but 2.5 million more were newly infected.
Nearly 3 million people in developing countries are now receiving antiretroviral drugs to treat AIDS, a treatment goal that health authorities had hoped to meet two years ago, according to a new report released Monday.
About 1 million people received the life-saving drugs for the first time during 2007, according to the report from UNAIDS, the World Health Organization and UNICEF.
During the same period, however, another 2.5 million people were infected with the AIDS virus, called HIV, indicating that health agencies are not gaining ground on the deadly infections.
"We have to do better with prevention," said Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of the WHO's HIV/AIDS department.
The new numbers mark the attainment of the goal set in the widely publicized "3 by 5" program, which sought to have 3 million people in treatment by 2005.
That target was "excessively aspirational," De Cock said Monday in a telephone news conference.
"Reaching that target even two years late is quite a remarkable achievement," he said adding that when the goal was set in 2003, well under half a million people were on treatment.
Despite the improvements, an estimated 6.7 million additional people still need treatment. Another 23 million are infected with HIV and will eventually need treatment as well, according to the latest WHO figures.
The agencies combined are now spending between $8 billion and $10 billion per year on AIDS programs, with about 55% of it going toward treatment, according to Elhadj As-Sy, director of the partnerships and external relations department of UNAIDS.
To achieve universal treatment, funding would have to grow to $35 billion in 2010 and $40 billion by 2015, according to the agencies.
One reason the number of people in treatment has increased is a decline in the price of AIDS drugs. Between 2004 and 2007, the cost of first-line treatments in the low- and middle-income countries fell by 30% to 64%, depending on the drug. But experts said similar price drops have not occurred among the second-line drugs that are used when the first treatments begin to fail. The nations referred to in the report are primarily in primarily Africa and Southeast Asia.
The agencies have also made substantial increases in preventing the spread of HIV from pregnant women to their children, according to Patricia Doughty, a program manager for the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF.
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