Good Reason to Celebrate World AIDS Day: Anti-Retrovirals Are Amazing Christina Hoag - TakePart
go to original November 30, 2013

UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibé says that on World AIDS Day 2013 we can see the end to an epidemic that has brought such immense devastation around the world. (UNAIDS)

Anti-retroviral treatment is well known as the wonder drug that keeps people with AIDS alive, but now more attention is turning to another use for the medication: It blocks the virus from being transmitted.

With a vaccine still some years away, HIV/AIDS advocates say the key to containing the epidemic is broadening the use of anti-retrovirals to prevent transmission, as well as to prevent sickness.

Known as “treatment as prevention,” the concept involves getting HIV-positive people on anti-retrovirals as soon as possible, even if they are still healthy and have no AIDS symptoms.

It represents a radical departure from what has been the traditional treatment strategy of administering the drugs only to people who are either already ill or with dangerously low immunity levels.

“It’s changing the way we look at AIDS,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC (AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition), an advocacy organization based in New York. “It’s the superhighway to an AIDS-free generation.”

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