Australia claims AIDS is no longer a public health issue

The number of AIDS patients in Australia is now declining. Australian scientists have claimed to have won the battle against AIDS. They have successfully controlled the development of the disease. However, this does not mean eliminating concerns about HIV infection.

The peak in the 1990s, each year about 1,000 Australians died of AIDS. Recently, however, scientists at the Kirby and Peter Doherty Research Institutes, together with the Australian Federation of AIDS Organizations, have reported that they have actually controlled the development of AIDS, in numbers. patients are getting lower and lower.

Professor Andrew Grulich.

Professor Andrew Grulich, head of the HIV Research and Prevention Program at the Kirby Institute, shared on ABC News: "We don't even need to monitor AIDS patients now, because that's just After a treatment, they will not be converted to AIDS again. "

In order to better understand the mechanism of AIDS control, we need to understand the development of the disease.

AIDS - or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , is a disease caused by the HIV virus. HIV works by destroying the immune system. So the symptoms of the disease may be different for each person when they start an opportunistic infection. AIDS is considered the final stage of infection, when the virus has caused serious damage to the immune system. However, some people may become infected with HIV without turning to AIDS.

Australia has participated in a few countries that successfully control AIDS.

An important milestone in the fight against AIDS was introduced in the mid-1990s, when scientists invented a drug that could degrade HIV. This is a premise to help HIV-infected people prevent the disease from developing into AIDS.

Despite successes in controlling the spread of AIDS, Professor Sharon Lewin, Director of the Doherty Peter Institute said that this does not mean HIV is no longer a problem. In fact, there are about 1,000 new cases of HIV infection each year in Australia.

Professor Lewin explains: "Uncontrollable cases still happen to people who do not have an HIV test. They only find out they have it when they have developed AIDS, or have an immune system. At that time, we cannot treat it anymore. "

Scientists from the Kirby and Peter Doherty Research Institutes, together with AIDS research organizations have announced: The number of AIDS patients in Australia is very small.

In May last year, US scientists took a step forward in finding a cure for AIDS when it first successfully removed the HIV virus DNA from animal tissue.

Currently, the treatment of HIV by combining antiviral drugs can only inhibit HIV replication, but cannot remove HIV-1 DNA from infected cells. In fact, if the patients stop taking the medicine, the virus will spread very quickly so that the patient quickly switches to AIDS. Thus, it is hoped that scientists will successfully use "molecular pull" technology to completely eliminate the HIV-1 genes from human DNA.