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Top American researchers called the treatment unthinkable for the millions infected in Africa and impractical even for insured patients in top research hospitals.

That mutation, discovered in a few gay men in the 1990s and known as Delta 32, must be inherited from both parents. With it, the white blood cells produced in the marrow lack the surface receptors that allow HIV to invade the immune system.

Doctors say the case gives hope for therapies that artificially induce the Delta 32 mutation.

needs younger leaders and scientists with fresh ideas and sense of purpose

Foundations, philanthropies and wealthy individuals are yet to become the backbone of the fight against HIV/AIDS

Resource-challenged target populations and governments remain at the outside, looking in

Organizations operating at local levels are yet to become integrated within national and international HIV/AIDS remedial programs.

The multiple roles of UN agencies

The third significant challenge is the twin slow progress in the search for HIV vaccine and the quest for universal access to HIV/AIDS services on or before 2010

UNAIDS should undergo a comprehensive, independent strategic, policy and operational review

She is paid US$3 for providing sex without using a condom and US$1 for sex with a condom.

According to 2008 research findings by the Community Health Department at the University of Malawi, up to 83 percent of prostitutes in Malawi are known to depend solely on sex work for their livelihoods and 95 percent of them have children. Sixty nine percent of the women who are involved in the sex trade are divorced.

unprotected sex, which is often practiced by sex workers, is among the key drivers of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Malawi

lack of negotiation skills and assertiveness in ensuring safer sex through condom use also aggravates the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted illnesses.

UNFPA has since funded the Family Planning Association of Malawi (FPAM) to work on reducing the transmission of HIV among the prostitutes by empowering them to practice safer sex, and by increasing the sex workers’ access to reproductive health, voluntary counseling and testing.

So far, the law in Malawi is silent on prostitution.

FPAM is engaging the sex workers by providing them with information, skills for negotiating safer sex (condom use) and alternative livelihood options, says Bessie Nkhwazi, the NGO’s district manager for Lilongwe.

FPAM, the government, NGOs and other service providers in Malawi realize that they cannot stop prostitution overnight, so their focus is largely on HIV prevention. And though FPAM and UNFPA create their workplans with the government, it’s mainly for appearances so they can say the government is somehow involved. Some of the money that FPAM receives comes from the National AIDS Commission, which is a government body, but the government is mainly helping to combat child prostitution through the deployment of child protection officers. The implementation of actual programs, especially those for older prostitutes, are really falling on the NGOs.

Microbicides could be a particular boon to married women. While condoms have been successful in slowing the spread of AIDS among commercial sex workers and others, their association with illicit sex makes many long-term couples reluctant to use them.

Another appeal is that some microbicides are not contraceptives, which means that women who want to get pregnant won't have to choose between exposing themselves to infection and having kids.

Reckoning with a legacy of such policies, Mbeki's's successor, Kgalema Motlanthe, acted on the first day of his presidency two months ago to remove the health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, a polarizing figure who had proposed garlic, lemon juice and beetroot as AIDS remedies. He replaced her with Barbara Hogan, who has brought South Africa — the most powerful country in a region at the epicenter of the world's AIDS pandemic — back into the mainstream.

They estimated that by 2005, South Africa could have been helping half those in need but had reached only 23 percent. By comparison, Botswana was already providing treatment to 85 percent of those in need, and Namibia to 71 percent.

The 330,000 South Africans who died for lack of treatment and the 35,000 babies who perished because they were infected with HIV together lost at least 3.8 million years of life, the study concluded.

the researchers had based their estimates on conservative assumptions and used a sound methodology

South Africa today is home to 5.7 million people who are HIV-positive — more than any other nation, almost one in five adults. More than 900 people a day die here as a result of AIDS, the United Nations estimates.