Official: AIDS cases not leveling off

BARCELONA, Spain -- In the last two years, the world has awakened to the AIDS tragedy and what it takes to bring it under control, but there is no indication that the epidemic is leveling off worldwide and strategies known to prevent the spread are still grossly underused, the U.N.'s AIDS chief said Sunday.\nMore than 15,000 people from around the world have gathered in Barcelona to spend a week looking for solutions to an epidemic that now infects 40 million worldwide, more than half of them in Africa.\nScientific discoveries in HIV and AIDS seem to be merely incremental, experts in the field said Sunday at the start of the high-profile 14th International AIDS Conference. New drugs that do the same thing -- but slightly better -- are emerging, but there's no vaccine or blockbuster treatment around the corner.\n"From a historical perspective, we are still in the early days of the epidemic," said Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of the U.N. AIDS program. "There are no indications that the AIDS epidemic is leveling off, not even in the most affected countries"