A South African expert has said that Aids could be beaten within 40 years if a global mass-population screening programme were introduced.

The Press Association reports that Professor Brian Williams told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that screening most of the world’s population for the HIV virus and treating those infected would halt the spread of the virus by 2015.

Prof Williams claims that by 2050, a large percentage of those with the HIV virus or Aids who were undergoing treatment would have died, thus ending the epidemic.

However, in terms of cost, screening the population of South Africa alone would cost £2 billion. But Prof Williams believes that screening costs would be offset by not having to treat infected patients, the number of which would dwindle, adding that screening would also save the lives of ‘productive, working-age individuals’. He called HIV/Aids ‘one of the worst plagues in human history’.

‘The problem is we're now using HIV drugs to save people's lives – we're not using them to stop transmission,’ Prof Williams told the association.

‘Can we use anti-retroviral drugs not only to keep people alive but also to stop transmission? I believe we can. I believe we can effectively stop transmission within five years,’ he said.

Prof Williams founded the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis and is setting up a key trial into mass HIV screening at Hlabisa. Initially, he will study two groups selected at random, one of which will undergo ‘whole population’ screening.

He said the idea had garnered ‘growing support’ from other HIV/Aids experts – and feasibility studies looking at ‘small, high-risk communities’ were already underway in the US, Canada and sub-Saharan Africa.

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