The end of Aids, the scary disease that has had people living in fear for mor than 4 decades, killing millions in the process is about to end. This time for good.
At least this is according to Bill Gates.
The following is what he wrote in his latest Gates Notes about the issue …
“AIDS-free generation” is no empty promise
In 2007, Wendo Aszed was in her twenties and enjoying life in Nakuru, a city in her native Kenya.
One day, her best friend, someone Wendo said she “would die for,” told her he had just tested positive for HIV. Wendo immediately set out to find drugs that would keep him alive, but it was too late.
He died within a month.
Not long after, Wendo quit her job at a bank and dedicated her life to fighting AIDS and other deadly diseases.
The story of her friend is sadly common in low-income countries.
Although the number of deaths from HIV/AIDS has dropped dramatically from its peak in the mid-2000s, the disease still kills 600,000 people and infects 1 million every year.
But someday we will be able to make sure no one else suffers the same fate as Wendo’s friend.
Thanks to recent scientific breakthroughs, for the first time ever we can realistically hope to end AIDS as a global threat.
To be clear, I’m not talking about eradicating HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
What I mean by “the end of AIDS” is that the vast majority of people with HIV will get medicine that keeps them from developing AIDS—and, eventually, will be able to get a cure for the disease—and that far fewer people will get the virus in the first place.
By the late 2040s, we should be able to achieve a 90 percent drop in deaths and new infections compared with what they were in 2010.
The world won’t need to keep paying for treatment for tens of millions of people living with HIV. Low-income countries will be able to focus on fighting other diseases and investing in economic development.
They will move faster toward self-sufficiency
Think of all the suffering we can prevent, and not just in poorer countries. Nearly 2 million Americans have HIV, and several thousand die of it every year.
Although the global health community has envisioned ending AIDS for more than 15 years, I didn’t believe we had everything we needed to make that happen. We still don’t, but I’m now optimistic that, in the next several years, we will.
Three things will make it possible to end AIDS.
Long-acting prevention drugs.
For nearly 15 years, we’ve had medication that dramatically reduces a person’s chances of contracting HIV. There’s a catch, though: It only works if they take a pill every day and never miss a dose.
Now, though, we have long-acting options.
One massive breakthrough is an injection of a drug called lenacapavir that protects you for six months per dose.
The Gates Foundation is working with the Indian drug manufacturer Hetero to produce a generic version of it for just US$40 per patient per year, which is affordable for low-income countries.
Patients could start getting it as early as 2027.
And in the meantime, the Global Fund and PEPFAR are working with Gilead to provide lenacapavir for up to 3 million people in South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and other countries.
The potential benefit of this breakthrough is enormous: If we can deliver lenacapavir to just 4 percent of the areas with the highest rates of HIV, new infections could drop by 20 percent.
And this is only the beginning.
Researchers are working on other long-acting options, including a monthly pill and a version of lenacapavir that could offer protection for a full year.
A functional cure.
Scientists are now testing a method for essentially curing HIV with a single shot. (I’m calling it a “functional cure” because the virus would still be in your body, but it wouldn’t develop into AIDS.)
Although it may turn out to be more difficult than we expect, I’m bullish on this approach.
If it works, it will be a mind-blowing thing.
Today, if you have HIV, you have to take a pill every day, for the rest of your life, to avoid developing AIDS and lower the chances that you’ll pass the virus to someone else.
The functional cure I’m describing would change that in a profound way.
It uses targeted genetic editing to prevent your cells from being invaded by HIV and to teach your immune system to attack the virus. You would never have to take another pill.
You would be much less likely to pass the virus on to someone else, and if you were exposed to it again yourself, you’d be at much less risk of being re-infected.
Scientists are using a similar approach to develop a single-shot cure for sickle cell disorders, which kill tens of thousands of people every year.
There’s a good chance we can get that cure within five years. An HIV cure will take longer, but the progress in the lab makes me hopeful that it will happen.
The tools we already have.
Since 2010, new infections have fallen by about 40 percent worldwide, thanks to a wide range of tools including condoms, voluntary male medical circumcision, and drugs that keep pregnant women from passing HIV along to their unborn children.
To deliver these tools, countries have built strong health systems that can reach people even in remote areas, and they will be key to beating AIDS.
But there’s a problem.
Governments are cutting funding for global health. These cuts have already disrupted the delivery of services, and if they aren’t undone, we could see an additional 6.6 million infections and 4.2 million deaths by 2030.
The cuts have also stalled trials and lab research on the breakthroughs I mentioned. Decades of government-backed research may be lost.
For our part, the foundation will keep funding lifesaving tools, but philanthropy can’t and shouldn’t replace government leadership and resources.
If wealthy governments like the United States go back to being as generous and engaged as they used to be, their leaders could go down in history as the people who led the end of AIDS.
Bill Gates
