LONDON: Two decades into the global AIDS epidemic, drug companies are perfecting ways of keeping the virus at bay.

Two new classes of treatments, offering fresh hope to patients resistant to current therapies, may mark the next step change in treating the killer disease.

T-20, a twice-daily injection which should reach the market in the first quarter of 2003, is the first so-called “fusion inhibitor” that stops the virus getting into cells in the first place.

Behind it is another class of compounds, called integrase inhibitors, designed to attack HIV from a different angle, which will be launched around 2006, if all goes well.

But such breakthroughs, to be highlighted at next week’s 14th International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, are of little comfort to the 28.5 million people infected in sub-Saharan Africa, only 0.1 per cent of whom receive existing AIDS drugs.

Today’s armoury of 16 medications may have turned HIV infection into a manageable chronic condition for many in the West, but the gap between rich and poor is wider than ever.

Despite high-profile price cuts of 90 per cent or more in the past two years, only 30,000 of the 730,000 people receiving antiretroviral therapy worldwide at the end of 2001 were in Africa, according to UNAIDS, the joint United Nations programme on HIV/AIDS.

“There were 500,000 people treated in the West last year where 25,000 people died from AIDS. In Africa, 30,000 are on treatment and 2.2 million people died. It is absolutely an unacceptable type of difference,” said Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS.

Price reductions and increased competition from copycat generics have, however, brought AIDS medicines within reach of some better-off developing countries, and 170,000 people now receive treatment in Latin America and the Caribbean.—Reuters