Expanding access to HIV prevention.docVIP

AIDS Research and Therapy BioMedCentral Short report Open Access Expanding access to HIV prevention Helene D Gayle* Address: Director, HIV, TB, and Reproductive Health, Bill Melinda Gates Foundation Email: Helene D Gayle* - helene.gayle@ * Corresponding author Published: 17 January 2006 Received: 13 December 2005 Accepted: 17 January 2006 AIDS Research and Therapy 2006, 3:2 doi:10.1186/1742-6405-3-2 This article is available from: /content/3/1/2 ? 2006 Gayle; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Background of the 45 million HIV infections projected to occur between 2002 and 2010 [7], and a study in early 2005 affirmed that expanded access to these tools could stop roughly half of infections by 2020 [8]. Still more infec- tions could be prevented by the development and intro- duction of new tools currently being evaluated, such as topical microbicides, new treatments for other sexually transmitted diseases, male circumcision, female dia- phragms, and the best long-term hope, a preventive vac- cine. The expanding HIV/AIDS epidemic represents one of the greatest threats to human health and international devel- opment today, and strengthening the global response is imperative. Despite recent progress in expanding access to HIV/AIDS treatment [1], the world continues to severely under-invest in efforts to fight HIV/AIDS, missing a tre- mendous opportunity to change the course of the epi- demic by bringing proven treatment and prevention interventions to scale. Nowhere is the need for an expanded response more apparent – and the potential impact greater – than in efforts to prevent the spread of new infec