THE International Aids Conference in Durban last week came out with some disturbing statistics. Of the 300,000 people who are infected with HIV in SA every year, almost a third are young women. This means that about 2,000 young women are infected with HIV every week.These are big numbers. By comparison, Brazil, with the most severe HIV incidence in South America, has 43,000 new infections a year.So we clearly need to try to reduce these new infections. The question is, how? In the past few years, there have been many studies showing that people on antiretroviral treatment (ART) were highly unlikely to transmit HIV to their sexual partners.The effect is so dramatic that many scientists and policy makers started suggesting that the main thing we need to do to end AIDS is to put all infected people on treatment, as soon as they are diagnosed. This "treatment as prevention" approach seems attractive.It means we can avoid difficult discussions about people’s sexual behaviour, and how to ...
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