PARIS, May 18, 2013 (AFP) - Big names in medicine are set to give an upbeat assessment of the war on AIDS on Tuesday, 30 years after French researchers identified the virus that causes the disease.
Scientists will pay tribute to the astonishing success of AIDS drugs and highlight steps being taken towards a cure -- a goal once deemed all but out of reach.
Entitled “Imagine the Future,” the three-day conference builds on the 30th anniversary on Monday of the isolation of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
The Nobel-winning achievement, by a team led by Luc Montagnier of France's Pasteur Institute, unmasked a killer.
Then began the drive to treat the disease and halt its spread.
“The discovery of HIV in 1983 and the proof that it was the cause of AIDS in 1984 were the first major scientific breakthroughs that provided a specific target for blood-screening tests and opened the doorway to the development of antiretroviral medications,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Introduced in 1996, after many years of frantic drug research, antiretrovirals are saving the lives of millions of people infected with HIV and helping to contain the virus' spread, Fauci said in an email.
By suppressing viral levels, antiretrovirals can prevent HIV being transmitted by pregnant women to their unborn children, and by infected people to their sexual partners.
But there have also been setbacks, particularly in the quest for a vaccine.
Only last month, US authorities halted the latest clinical trial -- launched in 2009 -- after the prototype formula failed to prevent infection.
Finding antibodies that are able to identify the slippery, mutating virus has proven to be almost as hard as the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack.
“Vaccine research continues to suffer from setbacks -- but pursue a vaccine we must if we are to truly see the end of AIDS,” said Adeeba Kamarulzaman, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Malaya, who will co-chair a global conference on AIDS science in Kuala Lumpur in June.
Counter-intuitively, the main hope nowadays seems to rest on a cure.
Three years ago, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi -- a 2008 Nobel co-recipient with Montagnier -- mapped a strategy for attacking HIV's “reservoir.”This is the cellular bolthole where the virus lurks after being pounded with antiretrovirals. Once the drugs are stopped, the virus re-emerges and spreads once more through the bloodstream.
“The great challenge will be to fully understand where the virus hides, how it manages to stay hidden so effectively and how to lure it out of its hiding place. We've learnt a lot about this in the past few years,” said Sharon Lewin, a professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
-- 'Functional cure' --
Lewin is part of a team cautiously experimenting with an anti-cancer drug to flush out the virus that destroys the immune system and exposes infected people to pneumonia, TB, and other opportunistic diseases.
In trials on 20 patients, the cancer drug awoke the dormant virus in 90% of volunteers. The ultimate goal is to kill the newly-exposed virus, leaving the cell it hid in to die eventually of old age.
“We do have drugs that seem to wake up the virus but these are only the first steps in ultimately clearing it out completely,” said Lewin.
Two other small studies using antiretrovirals at a very early stage of infection, before viral levels build up, have excited hopes of a “functional cure.”One involved a baby in Mississippi, apparently cleared of the virus after being given aggressive antiretroviral treatment within 30 hours of birth.
“It is certainly a very exciting finding, but this is only a single case and additional studies are needed to determine whether the circumstances of this particular case can be replicated among other HIV-exposed children,” said Fauci.
The other is a small French study of 14 HIV patients, known as the VISCONTI cohort, given drugs very soon -- within 10 weeks -- after infection. Treatment normally starts only once the immune system becomes compromised, sometimes years after infection.
The VISCONTI group stopped taking the daily drugs after about three years, and have remained healthy.
And crucially, none of the individuals are among that rare group of people -- fewer than one percent of the population -- who seem able to naturally stave off HIV and are known as “natural” or “elite controllers.”AIDS has killed 30 million people.
An estimated 34 million people are infected with HIV worldwide, and about 1.8 million die every year.
A year after the Montagnier team's historic publication in Science on May 20, 1983, a team led by Robert Gallo of the United States published similar findings -- triggering an acrimonious debate with research funding and prestige at stake.
It turned out that Gallo had worked on a viral sample originally sent to him by Montagnier.

WASHINGTON, May 17, 2013 (AFP) - An Organization of American States report published Friday called for taking a closer look at possibly legalizing marijuana in Latin America.
The report examined an issue that until recently was a taboo topic in the region. Politicians, desperate for measures to control drug-linked violence, are now open to legalization.
The report does not make specific proposals, but looks at different scenarios in which countries could handle the drug trade blamed on scores of deaths.
“Never before has a multilateral organization engaged in such an inclusive and intellectually legitimate analysis of drug policy options,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the largest US group pushing for reforming drug policies in the United States.
“It would have been inconceivable just two years ago that the OAS -- or any multilateral organization -- would publish a document that considers legalization, decriminalization and other alternatives to prohibitionist policies on an equal footing with status quo policies.” According to Nadelmann, “political pressures by the US and other governments would have made that impossible.”The new focus on alternatives to prohibition reflects the “unhappiness” of Latin Americans toward a US policy that continues to focus on crop eradication and militarized crackdowns, said Peter Hakim at the Inter-American Dialogue, a leading Washington think tank.
“Legalization is one alternative. I don't think it's going to really be widely adopted, but is a way of getting the debate started,” he said.
OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza traveled to Bogota to personally hand the report to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.
Santos, a key US ally in Latin America, is also one of the leading voices in calling for a fresh look at counternarcotics policies.
According to the report, the regulation of some drugs would allow governments to reassign resources to the prevention and treatment of addicts.

LONDON, May 18, 2013 (AFP) - The inquest into the death in Britain of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko was close to collapse Saturday after the coroner ruled he could not hear evidence about the alleged role of the Kremlin in his poisoning.
Litvinenko's widow Marina said she was “utterly dismayed” by the decision. She accused Britain of making a deal with Moscow to improve relations chilled by the murder of her husband, who once worked as a spy for Russia.
Coroner Robert Owen announced his decision in a pre-hearing ruling on Friday. It followed an application by Britain's foreign ministry to keep the information concerning Russia secret.
But Owen said he would be failing in his duty “to undertake a full, fair and fearless inquiry into the circumstances of Mr Litvinenko's death” if he was forced to disregard the evidence for national security reasons.
He suggested that the death could instead be considered in a public inquiry in which the evidence alleging Russian state involvement “could be taken into account”.
Under English law, evidence cannot be heard in secret as part of an inquest, but could be presented behind closed doors as part of a public inquiry.
The coroner said he now wanted to hear submissions from Marina Litvinenko and the couple's son on the possibility of holding an inquiry, parts of which would have to take place behind closed doors.
Litvinenko, 43, suffered a slow and agonising death after he was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 slipped into his tea at an upmarket London hotel in 2006.
Marina Litvinenko's solicitors said it was a “very sad day for British justice”.
Their statement went on: “Mrs Litvinenko is utterly dismayed by the coroner's decision to abandon his search for the truth about Russian state responsibility for her husband's death.
“The effect of today's ruling is to protect those responsible for ordering the murder of a British citizen on the streets of London, and to allow the Russian government to shield behind a claim for secrecy made by William Hague with the backing of the Prime Minister David Cameron.”She said it was a “frightening precedent” for people trying to hold to account the “conspiracy of organised criminals that operate from the Kremlin”.
“All those concerned with exposing the truth will be shocked and saddened that a political deal has been done between the two governments to prevent the truth from ever seeing the light of day,” the statement added.
There was no immediate reaction from Russia.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague has sought to prevent information regarding the death from being revealed during the inquest, which is due to start later this year.
The coroner said he partly agreed with Hague's request.
It is thought that Litvinenko, a former agent for Russia's FSB intelligence agency, was working for Britain's MI6 intelligence service at the time of his death and his family believe he was killed on the orders of the Kremlin.
British police have sought the arrest of two Russian nationals in relation to the death -- Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun -- but Moscow has refused to hand them over.
The Litvinenko case plunged relations between Russia and Britain into a deep freeze from which they have only recently emerged.
Alex Goldfarb, a friend of the Litvinenko family, said the coroner's decision was “deeply dismaying”. He accused the British government of prioritising its relationship with Russia over the need to hold an open inquest.
“It appears the British government is more concerned about the use of chemical weapons in Syria than radioactive weapons being used on the streets of London,” he said.
“On the other hand, it's an admission by the British government that the Russian state is culpable because otherwise they would not have requested immunity,” he added.
“That in itself is a partial victory for Marina.”Prime Minister David Cameron visited Russia last week to hold talks with President Vladimir Putin in a bid to forge a joint approach to the crisis in Syria.
A spokesman for the government said it would “carefully consider” the coroner's judgement.

CARACAS, May 17 (Reuters) - Venezuela on Friday released an opposition activist that had been jailed on accusations of inciting violence in the wake of President Nicolas Maduro's narrow election victory in April.  Retired General Antonio Rivero, who government critics described as the first political prisoner of Maduro's government, told a local television station he had been released after nearly three weeks in jail.  “Right now I'm just going to focus on my health,” Rivero, who had been on hunger strike during part of his detention, told the Globovision station. “I urge Venezuela, in the name of God, to continue the struggle.” A court had charged him with “conspiracy” and “public instigation” after authorities showed a video of him helping coordinate protesters in the capital's streets during a wave of violence that killed 11 people in the wake of the April 14 vote.
Maduro and allies said opposition leader Henrique Capriles, who lost to Maduro by 1.5 percentage points, fomented the violence in an effort to seize power by force.  They also say anti-government demonstrators burned down State-run health clinics staffed by Cuban doctors, accusations that were later disputed a prominent human rights group.
The country's congress set up a special commission staffed only by pro-government legislators to investigate the incidents.
Capriles describes Maduro as an illegitimate president and is challenging the results of the election in the country's top court, though few expect the court to rule in his favor.  Days before Rivero's arrest, authorities jailed American film maker Tim Tracy on accusations that he was working as a U.S. spy and advising opposition student groups on how to destabilize the country.  His family said he was making a documentary, and U.S. officials dismiss the accusations as absurd.