During the recently concluded AIDS 2012  conference in Washington DC it was declared that "A world without AIDS is in sight", but at Designers against AIDS we don't agree with this. While we have made a lot of progress in managing the disease since its outbreak, a world without AIDS, is still worlds away. In our opinion this is a statement that focuses mostly on the progress made in mother to child transmissions as argued by Lawrence Altman in the New York Times, but he also rightly points out that there are still millions of people living with HIV -whether they know it or not- and the numbers of Infections are still increasing in a lot of countries, especially (but not exclusively) the poorest ones.
The statement was a great way to bring optimism to the fight against AIDS and it might convince somedonors to be more generous with their funding, but it could prove a dangerous strategy in the long term. We DON'T have a cure or a vaccination against AIDS yet and we don't know how long it will take us to develop them, so promising the end of AIDS might be a bit too short sighted. It also makes us wonder what they mean by the end being 'in sight': in sight of our generation, of the generation being born now, or the ones that will follow in the next decades and even centuries? The only 'cure' against HIV/AIDS to date is prevention, so please know your status and protect yourself and your partner/s, this is how we are going to slow down this epidemic.