The end of HIV transmission: A once-unthinkable dream becomes an openly discussed goal

From statnews.com…

“We have the science to solve the AIDS epidemic,” Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, himself a longtime HIV researcher and clinician, told STAT in a recent interview. “We’ve invested in it. Let’s put it into action.‘’

Other leaders in the HIV field have been musing about the idea, buoyed by the astonishing impact effective HIV medications have wrought, both on the lives of people infected with or at risk of contracting the virus, and on the trajectory of the epidemic.

“It’s certainly doable in the United States,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a researcher whose study focused on HIV from the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic.

Fauci and other health experts are quick to point out that the goal of stopping transmission entirely is largely theoretical. There will always be some new cases, and the barriers to providing treatment to existing cases remain significant. There are still just under 40,000 people in the U.S. each year contracting HIV. As Fauci put it: “We live in a real world, we don’t live in a theoretical world.”

But “if we implement all the tools that we have and if we can theoretically, conceptually, get everybody who’s HIV infected on antiretroviral drug so that they will not transmit the infection to anyone else, theoretically you could end the epidemic tomorrow by doing that,” he added.

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