TORONTO, Ontario (AP) -- The big buzz at the world's largest AIDS conference is that a microbicide to help women protect themselves from HIV might be available in several years.
But AIDS experts warned Tuesday the world is woefully unprepared to ensure widespread access to such treatments.
Promising tests for new HIV prevention approaches are nearly complete, yet many financial and ethical obstacles could delay or even derail completion of critical trials.
More than 40 million people worldwide are living with the virus that can lead to AIDS; 25 million of them have already died since the first cases of HIV were reported 25 years ago.
Testing of microbicides that could protect impoverished women who have little to say over their health and bodies in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, will be complete by the end of next year.
A topical microbicide to help prevent HIV transmission could be available by 2010.
Recent trials of male circumcision have indicated men are more than 50 percent less likely to contract or spread the virus that can lead to AIDS if they have been circumcised.
But behavioral and society issues are still major barriers, and HIV prevention research faces financial and ethnical obstacles that could delay or even derail completion of critical trials.
"Very soon, we could have new, highly effective ways to prevent many of the 4 million new HIV infections that occur every year," said Helene Gayle, co-chair of the Global HIV Prevention Working Group as well as the 16th International AIDS Conference under way in Toronto.
"But these tools will have little impact in the real world unless we take immediate steps to complete current trials, mount new ones and reach people most in need."
The Working Group of dozens of leading AIDS and public health experts from around the world was launched by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Working Group, in a report released at the conference Tuesday, noted that fewer than one in five people at high risk for HIV infection have access to effective prevention, a rate deemed too low to have a significant impact on the course of the epidemic.
"The development of effective new HIV prevention approaches could help millions avoid crippling illness and death," said David Serwadda, director of the Institute of Public Health at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and co-chair of the Working Group.
"But unless we prepare now to make new, lifesaving tools accessible in developing countries, this scientific triumph will turn into a moral failure."
The report made three recommendations to prepare for the rollout of the new HIV prevention methods, which already have proven effective in clinical trials:
Major new donor funding;
more trained health care providers; and
better efforts to develop education campaigns to emphasize the importance of using simple, cheap prevention such as condoms.