HIV Sufferers Able to Live Longer Lives

I remember being in 5th grade when I really started to understand what HIV was and what an impact it was making on society. Rumors were swirling around on how HIV was actually contracted and fear was at an all-time high with parents across the country withdrawing their children from schools where any other children might be infected with HIV. Ryan White’s name was all over the newspapers and his movie was being made on a national network. In those days, HIV was like a fairly quick death sentence. If you had contracted HIV, chances were that death from complications of AIDS was imminent. In the 21st century, however, the tide seems to have turned.

According to a British study, those patients in developed nations who are inflicted with HIV do not have a greater chance of dying during the first five years after getting infected than the general population. While the chances of dying from HIV/AIDS-related causes do increase after the first five years (for those who were infected with HIV through sexual relations), the study demonstrates how powerful and impacting AIDS drugs can be when available and used consistently and correctly. One thing to note is that the study’s findings, which were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, were not relevant for those patients who contracted HIV through injection with drug usage. Unlike those who contracted HIV sexually, their risk for death was still high for the first five years after being infected.

The head author of the study, Kholoud Porter, an epidemiologist on behalf of Britain’s Medical Research Council, stated, “This is looking really good that life expectancies are becoming close to the uninfected population. It also underscores the importance that people are identified and treated early.” HAART, or highly active antiretroviral therapy, otherwise known as a cocktail of AIDS drugs, is directly responsible for helping those infected with HIV live longer lives, especially in nations that are considered more developed. Even though these HIV/AIDS drug cocktails must be taken for the rest of an infected person’s life, this is a small price to pay to stay healthy and to keep AIDS at bay.

The study encompasses over 13,000 infected males and females and compared the risk of death from the disease with uninfected equally aged males and females living in the same country, during the same time period. The AIDS cocktail of drugs did not become commonplace until the late 1990s. Before this time, the risk of death was anywhere from eight to twenty percent (depending on the age of the infected person). As the cocktail of drugs became more prevalent in developed nations, the risk of death (for the first 5 years after infection) fell to zero percent by the year 2000. As mentioned earlier, the risk for death does being to rise after the initial five years. Some theorize it is because either the patient begins to develop a tolerance for the drug cocktail or the patient unfortunately begins to stop taking his/her drugs on a regular basis.