From the article:
"The collapse was set off by the global recession’s effect on donors, and by a growing sense that more lives would be saved by fighting other, cheaper diseases. Even as the number of people infected by AIDS grows by a million a year, money for treatment has stopped growing.
Other forces made failure almost inevitable.
Science has produced no magic bullet — no cure, no vaccine, no widely accepted female condom. Every proposal for controlling the epidemic with current tools — like circumcising every man in the third world, giving a daily prophylactic pill to everyone contemplating sex or testing billions of people and treating all the estimated 33 million who would test positive — is wildly impractical.
...
But for most of Africa and scattered other countries like Haiti, Guyana and Cambodia, it seems inevitable that the 1990s will return: walking skeletons in the villages, stacks of bodies in morgues, mountains of newly turned earth in cemeteries.
...
For doctors on the front line, the frustration is palpable.
Dr. Natasha Astill is a British AIDS specialist working at a hospital on the edges of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, in a mountain valley with pygmy settlements close by fancy gorilla-tourist lodges. It is so remote that the drugs that reached Kampala in 2003 did not get here until 2007.
After a long day in which she and a nurse saw 118 patients, many huddling together in the examining room to avoid the storm pounding on the tin roof, she broke down in tears. All day she told subsistence farmers she could not, for example, treat the white fungal thrush filling their mouths unless they could pay $1 a day — more than they earn."
AIDS in Uganda - NYTimes.com Slideshow
After Long Scientific Search, Still No Cure for AIDS
From the article:
"The latest failed vaccine trial, in Thailand, took six years. It may have temporarily protected a few participants, but even that required six shots spaced months apart. That is too complicated for places like rural Africa, where polio drives often fail, though they involve only a few pink drops in babies’ mouths. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who oversaw the Thai trial, said he saw 'no chance' of a vaccine in the next few years and a 'reasonable' chance of one in 20 years.
The quest for a vaginal microbicide is also stalled. Women need a product that is not messy and can be inserted secretly, because many men react furiously to any suggestion that they are infected.
...
In July, results are due from a trial of a gel containing the antiretroviral drug tenofovir, which worked well in monkeys. It is expected to show neither a major breakthrough nor an utter failure, since, ethically, scientists would have had to stop the trial prematurely if preliminary results showed either trend."
Cultural Attitudes and Rumors Are Lasting Obstacles to Safe Sex
From the article:
"Casual sex is on the rise, epidemiological surveys say. Condom use, never very high, has dropped. Even among people who know they are infected, only 30 percent consistently use condoms."
As the Need Grows, the Money for AIDS Runs Far Short
From the article:
"Pepfar’s budget is about $7 billion a year and was last increased by 2 percent, so it has warned its aid recipients to expect no increases for at least two years. Its goal is four million people on drugs by 2014. AIDS activists are furious, insisting the result will be that children are saved only to die later of AIDS. But they appear to have lost that battle.
So, optimistically, the fund and Pepfar could jointly have 10 million on treatment by the end of 2014. But by then, at least 36 million will be infected and 17 million in dire need."
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