With little fanfare, a two-pill-a-day Aids drug called Isentress will be introduced from today, which should help many of the 73,000 Britons living with HIV to lead almost normal lives. There will be no protracted arguments about cost. Nor should there be any angry lawsuits brought by patients against primary care trusts. The drug has already been approved for use by the NHS at a cost of £21.58 per person per day. It obstructs the Aids virus in an entirely new way, offers radically improved defence against drug-resistant strains of HIV and should help to ease side-effects for patients who have become heavily dependent on other drugs. It will save lives.

When Isentress (from Merck) and another new Aids drug (from Pfizer) were first announced in the US last year, they were hailed as potentially the most important developments in Aids therapy in a decade. One respected specialist not involved in either new treatment said he had “every expectation we can suppress the virus in the vast majority of patients”. Considering the panic that accompanied the outbreak of the Aids pandemic in the 1980s, and the growing number of patients now showing resistance to available treatments, this was an astonishing statement. Yet it appears to be warranted, and is the result of successful, streamlined co-operation between commercial pharmaceutical leaders and multiple overlapping bureaucracies. Both are more used to criticism when things go wrong than praise when they go right. They deserve praise today.

The new drugs are not a cure; suppression of a virus is not eradication. But they are fundamentally different from the type of antiretrovirals that have been used hitherto to keep HIV at bay. Known as integrase inhibitors, the new drugs target an enzyme that inserts genes from the virus into DNA in the host's cells, allowing it to reproduce. Protease and reverse-transcriptase inhibitors, the two main existing Aids drug groups, attack the other two enzymes that HIV uses to replicate itself - but after the virus has taken root in the host's DNA. The difference is akin to keeping a burglar away from the Crown Jewels rather than catching him red-handed.

Many of those living with HIV are now in their second decade of treatment, requiring constant adjustments of individually tailored drug cocktails. Integrase inhibitors are approved for use with these cocktails, not instead of them. Together, the two approaches offer the prospect of longer lives and immense psychological relief for those for whom the search for new drugs has become a race against time.

In Africa, a choice of treatments is a luxury. A thousand people still die each week from Aids in South Africa alone, where President Mbeki outraged world opinion last year by sacking a deputy health minister who had dared to attend an international Aids conference without his permission, while retaining a minster - widely known as Dr Beetroot - who considers a good diet the best treatment for Aids.

NGOs are working heroically against the pandemic, and thanks to the Gates Foundation and the US Government they do not lack funds. But no national strategy will succeed without wholehearted state backing. President Bush visits Africa next month, still in search of a positive legacy. If he can shame Mr Mbeki into more positive action on Aids, he might have found one.