Scientists See Breakthrough in the Global AIDS Battle

In a landmark finding that scientists say could help stem the global AIDS pandemic, researchers announced Thursday that treating HIV patients with AIDS drugs makes them strikingly less infectious.

The results were so overwhelming that an independent panel monitoring the research recommended they be released four years before the large, multicountry study had been scheduled to end.

"I was bowled over," said Salim Abdool Karim, an AIDS researcher and professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa who wasn't involved in the study but was briefed on its results. "If we can implement this," he said, "we have a real chance to turn the tide on the HIV epidemic."

The randomized trial of 1,763 couples—in which one partner had HIV and the other didn't—confirms a growing body of less rigorous research and is likely to inject new urgency into treatment campaigns, especially in Africa, home to two thirds of the more than 33 million people estimated to have HIV world-wide. There, a global effort now under way to treat millions of patients with antiretroviral drugs could have the added benefit of slowing the spread of HIV. AIDS workers have dubbed this "treatment as prevention."

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