Mariana Wan's article 'Triple success in the fight against AIDS' (South China Morning Post, June 7) is timely and appropriate as encouraging results are emerging in the area of research on HIV prevention.
However, such enthusiasm should not be an excuse to divert our attention from critical issues such as access to HIV prophylaxis and vaccines, and the ethical issues raised by AIDS research. AIDS poses an unprecedented situation.
We need an unprecedented global strategy in order to deal with it.
The current direction of AIDS vaccine research is set by a handful of elitist scientists and bureaucrats, and production is carried out by a few international pharmaceutical companies.
Decisions regarding the quality of production, distribution and pricing are the exclusive domain of these groups.
Uncontrolled maximisation of profit is the driving force behind such decisions. Ethical issues related to such policy decisions are seldom articulated and discussed.
Perhaps the potential of traditional Chinese and Asian medicine in developing low-cost formulations to deal with certain opportunistic infections and repair the damaged immune system has not yet been explored adequately.
