The Covid Crisis Has Made The Fight Against AIDS Invisible

With December 1 marking World AIDS Day , Professor Gilles Pialoux, head of the infectious diseases department at Tenon Hospital (AP-HP/Sorbonne University) and vice-president of the French Society for the Fight Against AIDS, draws up an inventory of HIV in the world, evokes current treatments, PrEP and other means of prevention against the virus. Where are we in the AIDS epidemic today? Gilles Pialoux: In 2021, worldwide, 38.4 million people were living with HIV. If we look at the incidence data for that year, an estimated 1.5 million new infections and 650,000 deaths. So yes, these figures are in relative decline, but it is not spectacular. In France, the data is not very good, amplified by the fact that it was insufficiently informed, the health crisis not helping: 41% of mandatory declarations were not made for multiple reasons, preventing the rise modes of contamination and the socio-demographic profile of newly screened people. In 2021, we also note a stagnation in the number of diagnoses: 5,013, according to the latest figures from Public Health France, and an increase in the incidence on certain categories of the population such as young men born abroad and having relations sex with men, and trans people. In France, screening has stalled because of Covid: we lost around 900,000 tests in 2020. There is a lack of a real major screening campaign even if, and this is good news, we have noticed a slight increase in screening in the first half of 2022. Finally, the last important marker concerns late diagnoses. Last year, 30% of new diagnoses were at the disease stage, which is a very poor figure. Clearly, the Covid crisis has made the fight against AIDS invisible between the various confinements and bottled laboratories. Today, what are the possible treatments in case of seropositivity?