AIDS epidemic "over" in Australia, scientists say

Australia's top scientists and health experts have declared that Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is no longer a public health issue, with Australia joining the small number of countries worldwide to have successfully overcome the epidemic.

The number of AIDS cases diagnosed now is so low that researchers from the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations (AFAO), Melbourne's Peter Doherty Institute and New South Wales' Kirby Institute, have announced that the syndrome in Australia is now "over".

AIDS cases in Australia have dropped significantly since the introduction of anti-retroviral medications in the mid-1990s, which stops HIV from advancing to AIDS - where the immune system is so badly damaged that it cannot fight off the infection.

The infection is contracted when a person has bodily fluids (usually through unprotected sex or by sharing needles/syringes) passed into their bloodstream. At the peak of the epidemic through the 1980s and 1990s, AIDS killed about 1,000 people each year.

Professor Sharon Lewin, director of the Peter Doherty Institute in Melbourne, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that anti-retroviral drugs had been the key to the epidemic's decline, allowing people with HIV to live a long and healthy life.

"I've actually seen a dramatic transformation of HIV from a universal death sentence to now a chronic, manageable disease," Lewin said on Monday.

AFAO CEO Darryl O'Donnell said the number of AIDS-related deaths in Australia was now so low that it was not recorded.

"AIDS is over in the way we knew it. We've got access to treatment that has had extraordinary effect, and community activism since the very early years of AIDS in the '80s and '90s has helped the efforts to fight it," O'Donnell told Fairfax Media on Monday.

However, despite researchers announcing the remarkable progress with the syndrome, they said the end of AIDS did not spell the end of HIV.

According to the ABC, 1,000 new cases of HIV are reported in Australia each year.

Lewin said 10 percent of new HIV diagnoses in Australia comprised were made of people with advanced HIV infection.

"One of the problems we still have in Australia is people not getting tested, not knowing they're infected with HIV, and turning up for their first test when they already have AIDS, or already have significant immune damage," she said.

AIDS advocates will now target the 35 million people around the globe who are living with HIV, particularly those countries the Asia-Pacific region, where 180,000 cases of AIDS and 1.2 million cases of HIV are reported each year. Endit