Canadian researchers have become the first in the world to confirm that an anti-HIV treatment has led to a significant decrease in diagnoses of the virus, according to a groundbreaking study released Sunday at the International AIDS Society conference in Vienna.

The United Nations HIV/AIDS program director, Michel Sidibe, told the conference the UN is embracing highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) as the fundamental prevention strategy to fight the pandemic, based on results from the Canadian study.

For every 100 patients using HAART, scientists recorded a three per cent decrease in HIV diagnoses in British Columbia, said Julio Montaner, lead researcher and director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

“Today is a big day for us in B.C. and Canada. I don’t remember the last time a made-in-Canada strategy to address a global epidemic has taken this kind of initiative,” Montaner told Postmedia News.

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Acquired Immune Deficiency syndrome or AIDS is a collection of symptoms and infections resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus. The late stage of the condition leaves individuals prone to opportunistic infections and tumors. Although treatments for AIDS and HIV exist to slow the virus’s progression, but, there is no known cure. There is currently no vaccine or cure for HIV or AIDS. The only known method of prevention are based on avoiding exposure to the virus or failing that an antiretroviral treatment directly after a highly significant exposure, called post-exposure prophylaxis.

Well current treatment for HIV infection consists of highly active antiretroviral therapy, also known as HAART. HAART allows the stabilization of the patient’s symptoms and viremia, but it neither cures the patient of HIV, nor alleviates the symptoms, and high levels of HIV-1, often HAART resistant, return once treatment is stopped. Moreover, it would take more than the lifetime of an individual to be cleared of HIV infection using HAART. Despite this, many HIV-infected individuals have experienced remarkable improvements in their general health and quality of life, which has led to the plummeting of HIV-associated morbidity and mortality. In the absence of HAART, progression from HIV infection to AIDS occurs at a median of between nine to ten years and the median survival time after developing AIDS is only 9.2 months. HAART is thought to increase survival time by between 4 and 12 years. This average reflects the fact that for some patients and in many clinical cohorts this may be more than fifty percent of patients HAART achieves far less than optimal results. This is due to a variety of reasons such as medication intolerance/side effects, prior ineffective antiretroviral therapy and infection with a drug-resistant strain of HIV.