Even though the HIV/AIDS epidemic is not the biggest in history, it is likely the most devastating, according to an international authority on the clinical treatment of HIV/AIDS who spoke April 2 to about 100 medical students and faculty at the UC Davis School of Medicine.

Father Jon Fuller, a Jesuit priest who is an associate professor of medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine, explained Catholic moral theology and HIV prevention and examined the global social effects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

He was invited to lecture at the School of Medicine by the Newman Catholic Community at UC Davis and Stephen McCurdy, professor of public health sciences at UC Davis School of Medicine and director of the Master’s in Public Health program.

Father Fuller is a physician staff member of the Center for HIV/AIDS Care and Research, the Boston Medical Center’s adult clinical AIDS program. About two-thirds of the patients he treats are HIV-infected from drug use and about the same percentage have Hepatitis C, he said.

Reviewing the history of the epidemic, Fuller noted that by 1999, AIDS was the fourth leading cause of death worldwide and the number one killer in sub-Saharan Africa, where up to 35 percent of the population was infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Today some 40 million people around the world are infected with HIV and 8,000 people die of AIDS every day, he said. Five million new people are infected with the HIV virus each year and three million people die from AIDS. Cumulatively, some 22 million people worldwide have died of AIDS.

As an example of the devastating effects of the spread of AIDS, Fuller said the projected population of Botswana in Southern Africa will be greatly changed by 2020. By that time, a small number of young people will be taking care of a relatively larger number of older people who will bear the burden of the disease. In previous decades, many more young people were caring for fewer older people.

AIDS has “moved from a public health issue to a development crisis and finally to a security issue, because it really destroys social capital – the knowledge base that makes a society work,” Father Fuller said. “It weakens institutions across society, especially armed forces, education and health, and inhibits private sector growth, leading to widening poverty.”

Most of the development goals established by the United Nations at the start of the new millennium have a relationship to the AIDS epidemic, he said.

The epidemic “isn’t just about health,” he said. “We can’t take care of poverty, hunger, education and gender equality in the world unless we attend to issues of AIDS.”

While there is a dramatic increase in the number of AIDS patients being treated with drugs, only 20 percent of HIV-infected persons who need drugs are on them, Father Fuller said. Almost 500,000 patients were added to drug treatment last year, but in that same time 10 times as many people became HIV-infected.

“The bottom line is we can’t treat our way out of the epidemic — we really have to focus on prevention,” he said. “We are working on vaccines and microbicides, but those things are a long distance off, so we have to use what we know works today.”

Nearly a decade ago, Fuller called on Catholic leaders, using the tradition of Catholic moral reasoning, to support needle exchange programs for drug addicts to reduce the spread of HIV. He wrote that the church’s role is to protect the lives of “those without voice or power, those trapped in the cycle of addiction and those at risk for being infected by them.”

Father Fuller, who also teaches at Harvard Divinity School and the Weston Jesuit School of Theology, presented the same lecture to students at the Newman Center at UC Davis on the evening of April 2 as part of the second annual Teilhard de Chardin lecture series in science and religion.

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