Editorial: An ounce of prevention

Wednesday, March 29, 2006 | 7:15 a.m.

Nearly 25 years after public health officials noted a rare form of pneumonia in five men whose immune systems were failing, scientists say they are closer to developing a pill that could prevent people from contracting the virus that causes AIDS.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials had no idea in 1981 that the illness noted in five gay Los Angeles men signaled the beginning of a global epidemic that, despite major advances in halting its advance, killed 3.1 million worldwide in 2005 alone. The United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimates another 40.3 million are living with the disease.

According to information assembled by the Associated Press, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS was named in 1983 - two years after the viral anomaly was first noted. Within six years the number of reported U.S. cases reached 100,000, and by the time AIDS turned 10 in 1991, more than 250,000 Americans had been diagnosed. By 2001, more than 700,000 Americans had been diagnosed and 420,000 had died of the disease.

Education campaigns to thwart unprotected sex - HIV is spread mainly through sexual contact - and drug cocktails that prevent the virus from advancing in people have enabled many people to live with AIDS. In the United States, such discoveries have created a frightening level of complacency, as some residents told the AP they engage in unprotected sex now and then.

So it was with guarded optimism last week that federal researchers announced that two drugs already used to treat HIV seem to have prevented monkeys from contracting the virus. It is a big first step toward testing the drug in humans. One CDC scientist said some critics say such a pill simply would make "the world safer for unsafe sex."

But that is a narrow view of a disease that, in places such as Africa, has killed hundreds of thousands of children and orphaned an entire generation of others. Such a breakthrough offers a long-awaited glimmer of hope in a 25-year journey marked by darkness and fear.