[BRIEF NOTE] On the latest HIV/AIDS news
May. 1st, 2009 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI meant to comment on André Picard's article in The Globe and Mail last week, "Taming a deadly disease", before now. Briefly put, Picard presents the common knowledge that remarkable advances in the medical state of the art have made 21st century HIV/AIDS a survivable long-term medical condition, that AIDS in 2009 is no longer the near-automatic death sentence that it was in 1979.
Picard goes on to interview four different people who are long-term survivors of HIV/AIDS, one man infected in 1980 and others infected in the rest of the following decade, whose lives have been saved by medications with side-effects that they have been able to tolerate, some to a greater extent than others. With effective treatment at an early enough age, people infected with HIV can have near-normal life expectancies. This happy story is of course limited;![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
springheel_jack's recent observation that an epidemic disease like swine flu is going to have a disproportionately severe effect on populations unfortunate enough to live outside of economically developed countries, the ones with capable medical systems, certainly applies to HIV/AIDS.
This wonderful news takes me aback in a weird way. Growing up, I absorbed as much as anyone the news of an entirely unexpected and spectacularly horrible pandemic, the advent of effective new drugs was more background noise than anything else, the African HIV/AIDS has been covered extensively in Canada (Stephanie Nolen's 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa is a comprehensive and moving book on that epidemic from a Canadian perspective, if anyone's interested), and the disease certainly influenced my approach to my sex life. Mortal fear colours a lot of things. Now, I learn that given the right conditions it needn't be mortal at all, "just" another long-term medical conditions manageable with a sufficiently advanced technology in the right kind of society. I can't define this abackness very well other than to say that "Is that all there is?" comes close enough to what I'm thinking, or, perhaps, feeling.
Twenty-five years after the discovery of the AIDS virus, the deadly disease has been halted in its tracks – so much so that sufferers are now dying at a ripe old age.
Nearly 85 per cent of patients being treated for HIV-AIDS with drug cocktails have undetectable levels of virus in their bloodstream, according to new data from the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV-AIDS in Vancouver.
“People with HIV are not exempt from destiny,” Dr. Julio Montaner, the centre's director, said in an interview, “but they are no longer dying from AIDS.” That fact, he said, “really tells the story of how far we've come with treatment.”
[. . .]
[S]cientists have learned to subdue the wily human immunodeficiency virus: Powerful drug combos are used to shut down HIV replication and limit the damage it inflicts on the immune system.
The impact of this treatment regime, known formally as highly active antiretroviral treatment (HAART), is undeniable – adding, on average, 13 years to the life expectancy of HIV-positive people, according to a study by Robert Hogg of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV-AIDS.
Virtually anyone with money – or access to a public-health system like Canada's – can neutralize the virus's effects on the immune system and have a normal life expectancy.
“There's no reason people can't live 50 years with HIV,” said Anita Rachlis, an infectious-diseases consultant at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. “But people with HIV often have a lot of co-morbidities.”
Indeed, while survivors are living longer, they are also dealing with a combination of related health challenges: the ravages inflicted on the immune system by the virus over many years; the damage done by long-term use of powerful drugs; and the effect of other infections that came along for the ride with HIV (such as hepatitis, herpes and HPV), not to mention the normal process of aging.
Picard goes on to interview four different people who are long-term survivors of HIV/AIDS, one man infected in 1980 and others infected in the rest of the following decade, whose lives have been saved by medications with side-effects that they have been able to tolerate, some to a greater extent than others. With effective treatment at an early enough age, people infected with HIV can have near-normal life expectancies. This happy story is of course limited;
springheel_jack's recent observation that an epidemic disease like swine flu is going to have a disproportionately severe effect on populations unfortunate enough to live outside of economically developed countries, the ones with capable medical systems, certainly applies to HIV/AIDS.This wonderful news takes me aback in a weird way. Growing up, I absorbed as much as anyone the news of an entirely unexpected and spectacularly horrible pandemic, the advent of effective new drugs was more background noise than anything else, the African HIV/AIDS has been covered extensively in Canada (Stephanie Nolen's 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa is a comprehensive and moving book on that epidemic from a Canadian perspective, if anyone's interested), and the disease certainly influenced my approach to my sex life. Mortal fear colours a lot of things. Now, I learn that given the right conditions it needn't be mortal at all, "just" another long-term medical conditions manageable with a sufficiently advanced technology in the right kind of society. I can't define this abackness very well other than to say that "Is that all there is?" comes close enough to what I'm thinking, or, perhaps, feeling.
