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"Gates: Spur next big advance Search
for vaccine and universal treatment now top priorities in AIDS fight"
The
Star (www.thestar.com.my)
(15/08/06)
TORONTO: Preventive approaches, including speeding up the development of
drugs and providing women with tools to protect themselves, are the key to
stopping the spread of HIV infections, says Bill Gates.
And as the Microsoft founder sees it, the “next breakthrough in the fight
against AIDS” will be through putting microbicides or oral prevention drugs
in the market as soon as possible.
“Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable,” he said here on
Sunday night at the opening of the XVI International AIDS Conference, where
he and his wife, Melinda, gave the keynote address.
Microbicides, which is still undergoing clinical trials, can take the form
of a gel or cream that a woman could use to protect herself against sexual
transmission of the virus.
Gates said the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was determined to help
those in the field develop the drugs and get them to the people who needed
them.
Prevention, he noted, had to be put in the hands of women, so tools that
would help them protect themselves were needed.
“This is true whether the woman is the faithful married mother of four or a
sex worker working in the slums. No matter where she lives, who she is or
what she does, a woman should never need a partner’s permission to save her
own life,” he said.
Last week, Gates had announced the donation of another US$500mil (RM1.8bil)
to be spent over the next five years to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS,
Tuberculosis and Malaria under the United Nations.
There is an estimated 11,200 new HIV infections and nearly 8,000 deaths
every day, as reported by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS
(UNAIDS) in its “Reports on the Global AIDS Epidemic 2006”.
Melinda, in her speech, touched on the problem of stigma in the fight
against AIDS.
Malaysian AIDS Council president Prof Dr Adeeba Kamarulzaman had said last
week she was looking forward to “picking up some new science” and looking at
initiatives taken by different communities around the world.
She said Malaysians could learn many things from the conference, adding that
it always opened the minds of newcomers to what others were doing and what
could be achieved.
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