Bill Gates predicts HIV vaccine in next fifteen years
Microsoft founder Bill Gates has predicted that a vaccine, and new more intensive drugs to combat HIV will be available in the next fifteen years.
Gates made the prediction at the World Economic Forum in Davos, describing the two steps forward as “miracles”, but saying they are within reach.
As well as saying he thinks a vaccination would be available for HIV, and the new drugs, he said he thought the need for lifelong treatment would be eradicated, and the numbers of new diagnoses would be curbed.
“We’re pretty optimistic in this 15-year period we will get those two new tools,” he said.
“We won’t see the end of AIDS,” Gates continued. “But both for malaria and AIDS we’re seeing the tools that will let us do 95-100% reduction. Those tools will be invented during this 15-year period.”
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was set up in 2000 by the billionaires, and in their annual letter about the work of the organisation this year, said: “When we reach that point in the region with the most dense HIV transmission in the world, cases will start going down everywhere around the globe for the first time since the disease was discovered more than 30 years ago.”
Bill Gates has donated over $30 million (£20 million) to the foundation.
