What is the future of HIV?
The future of HIV is totally unpredictable in my mind, because you speak to me of the epidemic and I can't predict human habits of the future. I can't predict the sustained interest in financial support from governments, and therefore what can I say, it's impossible to know. We also, you also realize there are new forms of HIV appearing these are recombination's between one strand and another, and well I would be really surprised if any of them had big surprises in store for us, but I can't rule it out. So if you say to me "Putting all of those things aside and pretend nothing changes what do you think five or ten years." Yeah than I can give some answers, I think we're going to face increasing hell in a good part of Africa. I think we can't yet know how bad it's going to be in parts of East Europe and China and very hard to know the future in Latin America. Thankfully we have the blood test, which I'm proud to say came out of our group in 1984. Which not only helped us link this virus to AIDs as the causative agent, but opened the door way to public health because you could follow the epidemic soon after infection and not wait until you have AIDs and protected our blood supply so that allows us not too see blood transfusion inducing AIDs all over the world and increasingly I'm happy to say more and more countries even the most remote are beginning to get the blood tested properly and this can only improve in the future.
