December 1st, the AIDS day

December 1st is the AIDS day and around the world conferences, events and discussions remember us what serious consequence on human health has this epidemics. December 1st has been chosen because the first case of AIDS was diagnosed in 1981 on this date. Since 1980s, numerous information about HIV infection have been collected and published in scientific literature. Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a condition in which the immune system is less efficient because of viral infection and human body is more susceptible to opportunistic diseases and tumours. Everyone knows the modality of contamination through infected blood or seminal liquid or breast milk; everyone knows about the possible therapies to arrest viral infection.

Nevertheless, AIDS still kill a lot of people, specially in poorer countries such as Sub Saharan Africa where more the one million victims were counted in 2007. Education and prevention are challenges that poor countries must gain if they want to survive. Of course, the contribution of developed countries is not dispensable. Giving the difficult management of the infection with antiretroviral drug and keeping in mind that the vaccine is not available yet, unique way to fight this pandemics is the sensitization to acquire a preventing behaviour. Promotion of safe sex and needles exchange is an attempt to slow virus spread, whereas to limit mother to child infection, breast feeding should be stopped as soon as possible or not started at all. A lot of work should be done because infected people don’t know to be sick or how to protect the life of their parents or children. Humanitarian organizations, either institutional or no-profit, try to overcome all cultural and logistic problem for helping people to take care themselves. Several research laboratories continue their study to better understand the complex biology of retrovirus and specially the human immunodeficiency virus. HIV firstly infects CD4+ T cells, dendritic cells and macrophages and kills them by causing apoptosis, necrosis or activating CD8+ cytotoxic lymphocytes to eliminate infected cells. Clarifying the mechanism of infection has allowed to develop some specific anti-retroviral drugs that interfere and block crucial steps during the infection. It could be useful and ethical that all works would be published and available for free for all scientists around the world in order to fast the scientific advances in this field. Again, it could be also useful that the patents of anti-HIV drugs should be shortened and generic and less expensive drugs should be available for everyone to prolong survival. A sick person could die within one year during diagnosable AIDS phase in absence of antiretroviral treatment, so it’s really important that these therapies would be immediately provided in large scale. Despite the actual measures to fight AIDS, few years ago AIDS denialism was sustained by some governments and scientists, causing an unforgettable delay to save population. We hope that December 1st still induce us to reflect about AIDS, its victims and its social implications.