What makes that statistic truly alarming is that the gay community of New York City has been one of the most effective and organized in combating the disease and educating its membership about the dangers of unprotected sex and the importance of early testing. If those conditions exist among a community as aware and active as that, you have to wonder how many other people around the world are walking around undiagnosed. The normally reliable U.S. Centres For Disease Control and Prevention just announced that the figures they released detailing the number of new cases of HIV in the United States for 2006 was off by 16,300, as there were actually 56,300 not the 40,000 they had originally estimated.
What the hell's the good of using treatment as prevention if we don't even know how many people are even sick, or if they've been sick for any number of years before they even obtain treatment? Anyway, the whole idea smacks of closing the gate after the horse has escaped the barn. If you can prevent someone from getting the disease, they aren't even going to need treatment. It seems to me the folk recommending this new plan really need to remember the old adage of an ounce of prevention equalling a pound of cure. Especially since we don't even have a cure, only treatment that will prolong life, not save it.
Of course, the real problem isn't the people who are pushing this new strategy; the problem is the people caught doing the run-around. The biggest problem faced by people working in the HIV/AIDS field has been having to work around politicians and religious leaders who still live in caves and wont fund anything to do with needles, condoms, sex trade workers, or homosexuals. In order to secure funding, they have had to convince these folk that "innocents" (women, children, and straight men) are at risk and talk about everything but the people most at risk, and the ways that can best prevent the spread of the disease.
Just look at what happened yesterday, at what is supposedly a conference on how to fight HIV/AIDS. Canada's idiot Health Minister, Tony Clement, gave a press conference attacking Insite, the safe injection site for intravenous drug users in Vancouver British Columbia. He chose to do this in spite of the fact that it completely disregarded the information released by WHO spelling out how effective such sites are for harm reduction, specifically the spread of disease. His government's reason for not liking Insite or any other safe injection site? They can't arrest the people who use them.
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