BY SAM BANDA JNR IN ITALY, ROME

International Aids Society(IAS 2011) chairman Elly Katabira said on Sunday that the continent was moving in the right direction in the fight against HIV/Aids and that "we are at a scientific watershed" in its response.

Katabira was speaking during the opening of the sixth IAS conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention in Rome, Italy, the world’s largest open scientific gathering which has brought more than 5,000 Aids researchers, scientists, clinicians, community leaders and policy experts.

“We have witnessed two years of significant biomedical advances, the likes of which we have not seen since the antiretroviral breakthroughs of the mid 1990s. This conference might as well turn out to be the marker of that watershed,” he said.

He said the buzz around the advances in research citing the CAPRISA 004 vaginal gel, the HPTN 052 study on treatment as prevention, the talks around a global scientific strategy on cure research, PrEP and vaccines, will drive the debates during the conference.

UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibe, said time has come for universal access to science adding that the scientific community is advancing the Aids response as never before.

“A few years ago, the world could barely imagine what has now become real. We have solid evidence that ART prevents HIV. HPTN 052 showed that early treatment for people living with HIV can reduce sexual transmission in serodiscordant couples by 96 percent,” said Sidibe.

He said there were several developments which have taken place and that these can finally help the world reach the tipping point to end the Aids epidemic.

“The debate is no longer about HIV prevention or HIV treatment. It is about HIV control and nobody thought this was possible. On many fronts, we have moved from skepticism to scale up. Ten years ago, fewer than 50,000 people in Africa had access to ARVs but science and vision prevailed. Today, 6.6 million people in low and middle income countries are on treatment,” said Sidibe.

He however, noted that there were still skeptics among us some of which he said are now saying that treatment for prevention is too costly, too risky and unsustainable. But he said, people must work together to turn scientific successes into progress for the poor.

“We must overcome the forces that threaten access. We must scale up, even when some donors are scaling back. We must use innovation to overcome social division and inequity,” said Sidibe.

Sidibe said Aids can broker a new deal for global health but observed that the major challenge is no longer just scaling up access to medicines for millions of people, but rather providing medicines, often over a lifetime, to billions of people.

In a related development the Italian and international civil society has written an open letter to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ahead of the conference, on Italy’s failure to commit huge sums of money to the Global Fund, to drive Aids, Tuberculosis and malaria programmes.

The letter, strongly urges the Prime Minister, to ensure that Italy, announces disbursement plan for 2009 and 2010 contributions(260 million Euro) to the Global Fund plus additional US$ 30 million promised at the 2009 G8 Summit and reconfirms commitment for 2011-2013.

Since 2002, the Global Fund has become the main financier of programmes to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and malaria, saving 6.5 million lives and has contributed to improving maternal and child health also through promotion of the access to sexual and reproductive and HIV/Aids services.