Seth Berkley On AIDS Today | Big Think

Seth Berkley On AIDS Today

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Some today view AIDS only as a chronic disease.

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Seth Berkley:

Seth Berkley, President and founder of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, is a medical doctor specializing in infectious disease epidemiology and international health. The author of over 85 publications, the opening line of one of his articles encapsulates his life's work: "History will not judge HIV/AIDS kindly...the harshest words will be reserved for how the world responded, or rather failed to respond, to the epidemic."

Prior to founding IAVI in 1996, Dr. Berkley was the Associate Director of the Health Sciences Division at The Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Berkley is also an adjunct Professor of Public Health at Columbia University and an adjunct Professor of Medicine at Brown University. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Brown University and trained in Internal Medicine at Harvard University. He has worked for the Center for Infectious Diseases of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and for the Carter Center, where he was assigned as an epidemiologist at the Ministry of Health in Uganda. He sits on a number of international steering committees and corporate and not-for-profit boards and has consulted or worked in over 25 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

He is also an opinion leader, speaking frequently on health technology, development, AIDS and international health. In his words, "It is long past due to add HIV/AIDS to the list" of eradicated diseases.

Prior to founding IAVI in 1996, Dr. Berkley was the Associate Director of the Health Sciences Division at The Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Berkley is also an adjunct Professor of Public Health at Columbia University and an adjunct Professor of Medicine at Brown University. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Brown University and trained in Internal Medicine at Harvard University. He has worked for the Center for Infectious Diseases of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and for the Carter Center, where he was assigned as an epidemiologist at the Ministry of Health in Uganda. He sits on a number of international steering committees and corporate and not-for-profit boards and has consulted or worked in over 25 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

He is also an opinion leader, speaking frequently on health technology, development, AIDS and international health. In his words, "It is long past due to add HIV/AIDS to the list" of eradicated diseases.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Seth Berkley: It’s interesting. The AIDS epidemic, there’s been some perception that it’s just a chronic disease now. You can just take some medicines and that’s it. Well, thank God there are a lot of reasonably good medicines now to treat it. There’s lots of first-line and second-line drugs and so in essence, people can treat the infection, but people who get treated don’t have a normal life expectancy and some people can’t tolerate the medicines. The other thing is, because the virus is always mutating, you end up with resistance, so there’s a lot of problems with the existing paradigm. On top of that, most people still today don’t know they’re infected who are infected, so the epidemic continues to spread. Right now, for every person that is put on treatment, we have four new infections and so the epidemic is continuing to outpace that effort to go ahead and treat it. In the developed world, places like the United States, it hasn’t gone away; it’s been pretty steady and fairly significant. There’s been somewhere around 40,000 new infections a year; actually, the number’s probably closer to 60, not that it leaped up, but just because probably some problems with measurement. But in the rest of the world, there’s something like two and a half million new infections a year so it’s still growing and still a big problem.

Question: Is AIDS still a death sentence?

Seth Berkley: You are likely to die of HIV and its related conditions if you develop HIV. Luckily, with treatment now, you can go for a long period without getting sick and dying. How long that can be, we don’t know. Some people tolerate the medicines really well. They might approach a normal life expectancy. Some people take the medicines for a few years, have problems with tolerating them, get sick from the medicines,

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