Mass screening could 'wipe Aids out in 40 years'

 

Mass screening of everyone at risk of Aids could wipe out the disease within 40 years, a leading researcher has claimed.

Under the radical plan, billlions of people would be offered HIV tests once a year - and then treated with anti viral drugs if they tested positive.

The move could stop the transmission of the virus within five years - and end the global Aids epidemic by the middle of the century.

The AIDS virus has infected an estimated 33 million people and killed 25 million.

Sex workers in India attend an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign

The new plan is the brainchild proposed by Dr Brian Williams of the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis who is part of a growing number of scientists who believe anti-HIV drugs - rather than new vaccines - are the best way of preventing and eliminating the spread of AIDS.

A clinical trial of the plan will be tested later this year in South Africa - the country with the highest incidence of HIV and Aids in the world. It will be followed by trials in areas of American and Canadian cities where the disease is rampant.

The plan is adopted, screening would be offered in Britain to anyone at high risk of Aids.

'Our immediate best hope is to use anti retroviral drugs only to save lives but also to reduce transmission of HIV," Dr Williams  told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego.

'I believe if we used antiretroviral drugs we could effectively stop transmission of HIV within five years.'

Once the current generation of people living with HIV die out in a few decades, the disease would die with them.

The drugs lower the concentration of HIV - the virus that causes AIDS - in the blood, making the people carrying the virus less infectious.

'The problem is that we are using the drugs to save lives, but we are not using them to stop transmission,' Dr Williams said.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1252818/Mass-screening-Aids-sufferers-wipe-disease-40-years-claims-researcher.html#ixzz0gFqQrQzl

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