i don't mean to sound like a dissident - TheBody.com's Bulletin Boards

You are mistaken. Your uncle may have had had problems with the drugs but the vast majority of people in the US and Europe and Canada are living with HIV, taking the medications and working. It's a tiny minority of people who can live with HIV without taking drugs.

Remember that 22 million people in Africa who don't have drugs will die!
Millions of Children Orphaned by AIDS Pandemic
http://www.unicef.org/specialsession/activities/hiv.htm

This is not happening in the US. People with HIV are now having babies and get mortgages, etc. It's a changed world from 1993 and that's all due to the medications. I'm sorry about your uncle, but he's not indicative of the vast majority of people with HIV.

HIV Survival Increases in Triple-Therapy Era
Tue May 21,10:52 AM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A cure for AIDS (news - web sites) still eludes researchers, but new research provides more evidence that combination-drug therapy has gone a long way toward making HIV (news - web sites) infection a chronic, manageable disease for people with access to treatment.

In a study of HIV patients in France from 1992 through 1999, the time between initial HIV infection and progression to full-blown AIDS increased as HIV therapy evolved from a single antiviral drug to triple-drug therapy, according to a new report.

The study "revealed a major lengthening of AIDS-free times concomitant with the introduction of triple therapy for HIV in the late 1990s," according to Dr. Dominique Costagliola, of the Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale in Paris, and colleagues. Their findings are published in the May issue of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.

Costagliola's team studied roughly 4,700 HIV-positive patients who had a known date of HIV infection to see how long they took to develop AIDS. The researchers divided the patients into three groups based on the date of infection.

Patients in period 1 were infected between January 1992 and June 1995, when standard therapy included a single HIV drug, and patients in period 2 contracted the virus between July 1995 and June 1996--a period when standard therapy consisted of two antiviral medications.

The third group began treatment after July 1996--a time when treatment most often included triple therapy with a drug called a protease inhibitor and two other antiviral drugs.

Over the course of the 1990s, patients were less likely to develop AIDS, the authors report. Before the middle of 1995, the odds of remaining AIDS-free 5 years after infection was about 70%, but it climbed to almost 78% between mid-1995 and mid-1996 and to nearly 90% after the middle of 1996. After mid-1996, the risk of developing AIDS dropped by 64%, the report indicates.

In addition, the time between HIV infection and the development of AIDS increased during the 1990s, Costagliola and colleagues report. Before mid-1995, the average estimated time between HIV infection and full-blown AIDS was 8 years, but it increased to almost 10 years from mid-1995 to mid-1996, and to 20 years after the middle of 1997.

In similar findings published in the same journal issue, New York health officials report that survival rates increased among people with AIDS in New York City after the introduction of combination therapy.

In a study of nearly 80,000 people with AIDS, 43% who had been diagnosed from 1990 to 1995 were still alive 2 years later. But for those diagnosed from 1996 to 1998, the 2-year survival rate increased to 76%.

But not all AIDS patients in New York City fared the same, according to a team led by Dr. E. James Fordyce at the New York City Department of Health. People with certain AIDS-related illnesses, particularly some types of cancers, seemed to benefit the least from combination therapy, according to the report.

SOURCE: Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes 2002;30:81-87,

Post Extras: Remind Me!