Circumcision 'fantastic prevention' for HIV

The biggest conference to address AIDS in the last 30 years found new cases of HIV in a South African township dropped by 76 per cent when a circumcision programme was carried out.

Three studies have shown circumcision reduces the risk of infection by 60 per cent after previous evidence suggested no link.

"This study is a fantastic result for a simple intervention which costs 40 euros ($A52.39), takes 20 minutes and has to be done only once in a lifetime," said David Lewis of the University of the Witwatersrand.

The four day conference in Rome also found that treatment of antiretroviral drugs as prevention was the best way of saving an HIV positive patient from the death sentence of AIDS.

And it also found that giving non-infected partners drugs can cut the risk of HIV transmission by 73 per cent.

But this practice of giving drugs to a non-infected person is likely to remain rare.

At a time when AIDS funding is static, getting the drugs and equipment to fight it could be a long time coming.

"Now it's up to the donors and the policymakers, with WHO (World Health Organisation) backup, to grab this epidemic by the horns and finally turn it around," said Eric Goemaere of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders).

In 2009, more than 33 million people worldwide were living with HIV and 2.6 million people became newly infected.

In 2010, resources drifted downwards to $US15.9 billion ($A14.87 billion) as Western countries tightened their belts.

Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and former director of UNAIDS, said the results at Rome were exhilarating.

But he urged pragmatism."Science is running much faster now than we can implement and what we can pay for," he said.

"When you look at longer-term perspectives, even under the best-case scenarios there will still be one million new infections (annually) 10, 20 years from now, and also about one million deaths, and that's a very sobering thought."