Sunday, March 15, 2009

Better drugs encouraging AIDS complacency: Nobel doctor

From AFP:
People are forgetting to practise safe sex because they no longer fear dying from HIV/AIDS, says the doctor who won the Nobel prize for helping to discover the virus.

Treatment advances mean "some people in my country, France, and other Western countries have become complacent -- they see HIV/AIDS as a chronic disease -- not as one that can kill," virologist Francoise Barre-Sinoussi said.

The doctor shared the Nobel Prize last year with fellow French virologist Dr Luc Montagnier for their discovery in 1981 of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS.

Barre-Sinoussi noted there has been a huge leap forward in treatments for HIV/AIDS with a cocktail of drugs that reduces the level of virus in the body and likewise lowers the risk of passing on the pathogen to others.

But she told AFP she worried that people's confidence in retroviral drugs had created a false sense of security, leading to an increase in unprotected sex. ...more

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