Rebecca Baggaley of London's Imperial College said that increased access to the AIDS drugs in developing countries could increase HIV infection rates.
Hence he said that these have to be accompanied by prevention measures, such as patient education. Statistics show that about 95 % of the infected HIV people live in the developing world. This is due to the reason that there is a global push by the World Health Organization to get anti-viral therapy to as many patients as possible. The study was published in the journal Public Library of Medicine. She also said that in the developing countries as they lack recourses the effect would not be that of the desired one.The resources include counseling patients about how to prevent spreading HIV. This would aid in the WHO campaign against AIDS. To understand the outcomes of anti-viral therapy in poor countries, Baggaley and colleagues developed a model of HIV conditions in Malawi in sub-Saharan Africa. She says even with AIDS drugs administered to them, the model predicts HIV-positive individuals in developing countries are unlikely to do well. The main reason being that they tend to be diagnosed at a late stage in the disease. There is no proper monitoring of the patient’s progression, lack of proper nutrition, fail to take the drugs in a regular basis.
The main goal of antiviral therapy in Malawi and other countries (developing countries) is that more people would l be diagnosed earlier in the course of the disease. This would facilitate in they obtaining the drug at an earlier stage of the disease thereby increasing their life expectancy. But Ms. Baggaley adds that HIV prevalence would increase with antiretroviral therapy. She said that in the United States, widespread use of antiviral drugs led to an increase in unprotected sexual activity among gay HIV-positive men.
