AIDS: lessons learnt and myths dispelled.

摘要

Nearly 30 years into the AIDS epidemic, we are able to assess our progress in tackling the disease with both increased knowledge and the benefit of hindsight. This Viewpoint examines what we-the international community-got right, what we got wrong, and why we need to urgently dispel several emerging myths about the epidemic and the global response to it. When HIV was emerging in the early 1980s, we clearly underestimated the global effect that the disease would have, and that in only a few decades, tens of millions of people worldwide would become infected. The epidemic nowadays is the result of what 30 years ago was an unpredictable-but tremendously potent-combination of intimate personal behaviours (notably, unprotected sex and needle sharing) and socioeconomic factors (including poverty, gender inequity, social exclusion, and migration) that have affected nearly every country worldwide.