科技英语新闻:Interview: AIDS epidemic in U.S. remains at "unacceptable high" level: expert

WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 (Xinhua) -- In the United States, the AIDS epidemic has plateaued, but it is still at "unacceptable high" level, a U.S. expert said ahead of the World AIDS Day.

"The situation is stable in the United States, stable in an unacceptable high level for at least 10 years and has not gone down. It's still a serious problem," Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told Xinhua in an exclusive interview.

According to Fauci, there are about 1.1 million people infected with HIV in the U.S., of which about 20 percent do not know they are infected. Those are the ones that more likely will infect other people. Since the world's first AIDS case was reported 30 years ago, the U.S. has seen close to 600,000 AIDS-related death. And among the 65,000 new infections each year in the U.S, about 50 percent are African Americans. In the United States, about 12 percent of the population is African American.

"Our new approach to prevention is to try and get access at community level, to people at most risk, to seek out to voluntarily test, to link them to care, and to automatically get them treatment," said Fauci. "When you get someone on treatment, it is extremely unlikely that they will infect their sexual partner."

Fauci thought the international community's battle against the HIV/AIDS has gotten better over the last 30 years.

Early on, when the disease was inaccurately thought to be a disease of developed world. There was a denial in many countries in Asia, in Southern Africa, South America and Caribbean, that this will turn out to be an extraordinary problem in those countries. As the years went by, it was clear that it was not a disease of gay men in the United States and the developed world. It was a disease mostly in the developing world when 90 percent of new infections occur in low- and middle-income countries and 67 percent of the cases are in Southern Africa.

"The response of the global community first was denial and not full appreciation of the potential impact of the pandemic. As the years have gone by, the response has been better and better," said Fauci, an immunologist that has made substantial contributions to research in the areas of AIDS and other immunodeficiencies, both as a scientist and as the head of NIAID.

The advance in the arena of therapy with drugs has been " spectacular" and "very impressive", he said.

In the early 1980 before there were any drugs, the median survival period of people in the United States who was infected with HIV, was about six to eight months. "Today in 2010, if someone was newly infected with HIV and he's 20-25 years old, and you put them on therapy, you can predict mathematically that they will live additional 50 years," said Fauci.

Over the last couple of years, there has been "significant but slow" advances with vaccines against HIV. For example, there was a trial that was conducted in Thailand in which there was a modest degree of efficacy, about 31 percent of protection.

"That's not enough to have a vaccine available for widespread use but give us some important clues into what next generation of vaccines would be," said Fauci.

As to the "three zeros" target adopted by the United Nations this year, Fauci said that it's "aspirational but not gonna be easy."

"It is good to set very high goals for the future. I don't think that we realistically are gonna get to zero new infections, zero new discrimination, zero (AIDS-related) death in the next few years," said Fauci. "I think it will take several years to get there. I believe that if more countries and the international community are engaged to play a role in trying to stop HIV, to prevent and treat and care for HIV-infected individuals, that we will automatically achieve that objective."