Spit & Polish 25 June 2011

Thirty years after the first Aids death was identified, are we any closer to getting rid of the disease?

When I was a child, there was a huge polio scare. That terrible, debilitating disease was a scourge, but it was finally defeated by two Americans, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, in the mid-1990s. Many awards were given to these two men, but polio has not vanished from the planet, as the dodo and the dinosaur did.

The disease lingers in remote and poverty-ridden countries such as India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria and others, but the numbers continue to dwindle. Polio has become a manageable and treatable disease, but the real ailments now are ignorance and poverty.

Then I saw a headline on the cover of The Economist that posed the question: "The End of Aids?" I read the article and realised that the headline was deliberately enigmatic. It is a question, not a statement. What it boils down to is whether the funds for Aids research and testing will survive the world's economic problems.

The global financial structures are, at the very least, fragile and volatile. Greece is bankrupt. Ireland, once called the "Celtic Tiger", is struggling. Even the US is tightening its belt, and when it comes down to finding enough money for countries to retain their hold on power, Aids research may find itself stranded at a crucial moment.

The good news, as described by Bertrand Audoin, the executive head of the International Aids Society, is that their research has reached the possibility of completely eradicating the virus in people's bodies, as opposed to just stopping it from reproducing. It's a slender chance, and one made even more fragile as the industrialised world confronts its monetary meltdowns.

I am very interested in this because I have oversight of a child born to an HIV-positive mother. Over the last six years I have seen him grow into a lively, happy, ordinary kid. Once a month, he gets his anti-retroviral medicine, he takes it as prescribed, and he's fine.

For me, that is something of a miracle, when you consider what might have happened if the suggestions put in place in South Africa many years ago had stayed in place.

Do you remember the destructive stupidity that lurked behind the dictates of Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the then-health minister, who turned her back on all the scientific evidence to champion garlic and beetroot as a cure for Aids? We will never know how many people believed her and chomped their way to an early death on vegetables.

But that was not the least of it. Do you recall the duelling doctors, American Robert Gallo and French Luc Montagnier, who separately claimed to have discovered the virus that caused Aids?

Each man called his discovery by a different name, but what they discovered was identical and there was a huge to-and-fro about who had found it first. Eventually Montagnier won a Nobel Prize, but Gallo did not, even though he went on to work effectively on the research.

Then there was the "miracle drug" AZT, which was quickly demonised as a drug that actually weakened the immune system. In fact, there was a widespread theory from scientist Peter Duesberg, who insisted that drug-users, especially those who took AZT, were enabling the virus through their addiction.

The pandemic became an important theme in books and films. Randy Shilts wrote And the Band Played On, arguably the best book about the HIV-Aids epidemic. It was made into a film in which many famous actors worked for free to get the message out.

Another film on the subject was Longtime Companion (1981) with Dermot Mulroney and Bruce Davison. It was followed by Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington in the most powerful of the Hollywood films, Philadelphia (1993). Hanks played a lawyer infected by Aids who fought a courtroom battle against his legal firm after being fired.

It was a turning point in the public perception of the Aids pandemic. South African Darryll Roodt's film Yesterday (2004) was also an international success and even Bollywood has created films on the subject.

Conspiracy theories flourished, most of them suggesting that HIV was created as a weapon to be used for achieving US and European domination of the "Third World".

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai told Time magazine: "Aids is a biological weapon manufactured by the developed world to wipe out the black race. I have no idea who created Aids and whether it is a biological agent or not. But I do know things like that don't come from the moon ... "

Maathai subsequently recanted in December 2004, saying: "Such views are wicked and destructive."

But conspiracies of that kind still circulate, based on concepts that date back to the first recognised death from Aids in 1980.

So here we are, 31 years later, and The Economist is asking if this is "the end of Aids". There have been successes, such as polio. But we still have not ended the fight against these diseases, and while winning one battle is admirable, will a complete victory ever be within our grasp?