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AIDS SELENOENZYME SOLUTION THE Eating foods grown in selenium- deficient soils or having a prior infection by a selenium-encoding pathogen are factors which promote susceptibility to HIV infection and ultimately AIDS. — Ray Bradbury THE MOST PROBABLE FUTURE n 1992, in a lecture to the French Academy of Sciences, William A. Haseltine point- ed out that "the future of AIDS is the future of humanity". Haseltine,' then the chief retrovirologist at Harvard's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, went on to add that "Unless the epidemic of AIDS is controlled, there is no predictable future for our species". Later, testifying at a US Senate hearing, he predicted that by the year 2000 we could expect 50 million people to have been infected by HIV.’ In his opinion, by 2015 the total number of dead or dying could reach one billion—that is, some sixth of the current global population. Time has proven Haseltine to have been over-optimistic. By the end of 2000, an esti- mated 57.9 million people had been infected by HIV, 21.8 million of whom were already dead.* Current figures suggest a total of 70 million people have become HIV seropositive since the pandemic began in the early 1980s.* As a consequence of our inability to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS, several of the worst- affected countries in sub-Saharan Africa are now on the verge of total social collapse as life expectancies, productivity, tax revenues and GDP dramatically fall and the need for expanded healthcare rises. There are many signs that suggest this situation will continue to worsen rapidly in the foreseeable future.* PAST FAILURES At an over-optimistic press conference held in 1984, Margaret Heckler, at that time the US Health and Human Services Secretary, announced the discovery of HIV, the virus believed responsible for the AIDS pandemic. She then went on to predict that a vaccine against this virus should be available within five years.° Heckler was clearly no Nostradamus, since almost 20 years later—after the expenditure of untold billions of research dollars—there is still no effective vaccine against either HIV-1 or HIV-2. Of course, there is no shortage of those willing to continue the expensive search to find one. In June 2003, for example, 24 co-authors, including Nobel Prize winners, college presi- dents, heads of major US public health departments and AIDS researchers from around the world combined to argue for a Manhattan Project against AIDS. This, of course, would focus its efforts on the discovery of the long-awaited vaccine against HIV.” While there's no doubting the need for such a vaccine, there seems to me to be a very distinct possibility that it will not be available before 2015 and the infection of one sixth of the global population. The news is not much better from the treatment front. HIV-1 exhibits at least two char- acteristics that make it extremely difficult to eradicate. Firstly, it lacks the ability to "proofread" its genetic sequences during replication.* The large number of resulting genetic errors results in the creation of endless variants, some of which inevitably will be immune to the antiretroviral drugs being used in treatment. As a consequence, inhibitors of reverse transcriptase and protease have promoted the evolution of drug-resistant strains of HIV that are now spreading rapidly in the developed world.*"" At least one of these new strains is resistant to all three classes of drugs that are currently used to treat HIV/AIDS. Patients infected by this new strain have gone from being totally asympto- matic to having fully developed AIDS within a few months." The treatment situation is by Harold D. Foster, PhD © 2003 Professor, Department of Geography University of Victoria PO Box 3050 Victoria, BC, V8W 3P5, Canada Email: hfoster@mail.geog.uvic.ca Website: http://www.hdfoster.com Email: hfoster@mail.geog.uvic.ca Website: http://www.hdfoster.com NEXUS + 27 I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it. DECEMBER 2003 — JANUARY 2004 www.nexusmagazine.com