By Ben Hirschler DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 24 (Reuters) - After years of fire-fighting HIV/AIDS, the time has come to develop a long term strategy for tackling the pandemic, the head of the global fund set up to fight the disease said on Wednesday. "As we get the fire engine to the scene and begin to put out the blaze, which I think is what is happening, our attention now must begin to focus on the long term," Richard Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, told Reuters. He was speaking as experts from international organisations and drug companies met at a satellite meeting during the World Economic Forum to discuss how the pandemic will develop by 2025. For the first 20 years, the world had failed to act to halt the carnage from AIDS in the developing world but that had changed in the last five years, he said. "Now we have some early successes, with 1.5 million on antiretroviral therapy -- and the number is doubling every year," Feachem said. The AIDS virus infects around 40 million people globally, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. It killed an estimated 2.9 million in 2006, according to UNAIDS, the U.N. programme on HIV/AIDS. But despite the recent advances in getting life-saving medicines to some of the world's poorest countries, for every person put on medication, 10 more are newly infected. The result is a "receding horizon" in getting to grips with the epidemic, which the world had to address, Feachem said. There are also mounting cost implications for today's expanded drug treatment programmes, with patients expected to stay on therapy for life and likely to need more expensive second- and third-line drugs if they develop resistance. "Unless we really focus on those long-term issues and get a high measure of agreement, we are not going to make the right decisions today and tomorrow," he said. A coherent prevention strategy is critical and Feachem said decisions would have to be made in the coming years on the role of vaginal microbicides and male circumcision -- as well as the potential of any future vaccine.
