Foreign Policy: The Next AIDS Pandemic
Laurie Garrett, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations

“Thousands of HIV/AIDS experts are gathered in Paris this week for their biennial world conference, and leaders are exhorting every one of them to fight for global financing and expand access to treatment, especially in Africa. But the world cannot treat its way out of AIDS, and without a revolutionary breakthrough in either vaccines or the entire model of HIV control, a massive second global wave of AIDS will come, perhaps within the next 10 years. … Without an effective, affordable vaccine, the toolkit for slowing a second HIV pandemic is limited to the same marginally effective one that brought us millions of infections in the 1990s: condoms, sexual abstinence, sterile needles, safe blood transfusions, and a constant deluge of warnings to the youthful public. If the world isn’t willing and able to not merely stay the course, but expand support for treatment and R&D, it is hard to imagine any way out of the grim pandemic scenario…” (7/26).