In Focus

The AIDS menace has once again occupied the centrestage. In one of the largest gatherings in recent years, over a 15,000-strong crowd of AIDS experts, activists, drug manufacturers and film stars met to confabulate at the 11th international conference on the disease, which has assumed epidemic proportions. Compared to the earlier two conferences where the mood was gloomy, this conference, which was held in Vancouver, British Columbia, between July 7-13, reflected a message of hope and optimism. Enthused Martin T Schechter, co-chairperson of the conference, "We have our first glimmers of hope in a long time."

The past few months have been characterised by many a breakthrough by pharmaceutical industries, all of which have claimed to control if not stop the disease in its tracks. However, the verdict now is that where individual drugs were unable to field off a persistent HIV virus, a combination of them might do the trick. The drugs which would make an effective combination could be AZT, ddl and Nevripine. These would act on different enzymes at different sites in the virus to overcome resistance. That this 'cocktail' of drugs would reduce the presence of the virus in the patient's blood to an insignificant amount, is the prevailing belief among AIDS researchers.

The scientists are, however, proceeding cautiously. Warned Peter Piot, executive director of the joint UN programme on HIV / AIDS, that optimism should be balanced against the knowledge that there are currently 22 million HIV virus carriers in the world today.

India, meanwhile, seems to have set a certain dubious record of having the largest number of people infected with the virus -- three million out of 950 million people -- within a span of few years after the first case was detected. The virus came to the sub-continent about a decade later after its appearance in the West in 1981.