New medicines are making some people in the West complacent about AIDS, leading to a rise in HIV infection rates, a leading AIDS researcher said on Wednesday.
“Obviously having therapy that could prevent death in places where such treatment is accessible could result in complacency,” said David Ho, from the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Rockefeller University in New York.
“And it has resulted in complacency in places such as the U.S. and Europe,” he told an AIDS forum in Hong Kong.
“The complacency is tragic and we’re seeing among the young in the U.S. a resurgence in infection rates especially in young gay men. Despite all the lessons learned over the past few decades, the same mistakes are being repeated.”
Ho, who helped design powerful protease inhibitors that proved the key to treating HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, called for an aggressive public education campaign warning people not to let down their guard.
AIDS is the number-one killer in Africa and health agencies warn it could afflict more than 10 million people in China by 2010 if not taken seriously there.
China showed its commitment to tackling its AIDS epidemic last year when Premier Wen Jiabao shook hands and chatted with AIDS patients in a Beijing hospital, but experts say such attitudes have yet to filter down to local officials or the masses.