30th Jul 2008
Skip the beetroot and garlic
HIV-deniers (among many other things) seriously annoy me with TEH STUPID, so it was nice to hear a study has proved that people with HIV are living longer on the latest anti-retroviral therapy. Not like the link between HIV and AIDS is in doubt in any reputable scientific circle, but the more evidence the better, eh? 
So, hooray for modern medicine. We now return to our regularly scheduled mulling of retro miscellaneous…
It’s actually very significant that people are living substantially longer on the anti-retroviral drugs. I remember that when they first developed the multiple-drug cocktails that are standard HIV treatment now, the were very effective at delaying the onset of AIDS. Yet they were much less effective at prolonging life overall. People who had been taking the cocktails for years progressed much more quickly when they contracted full-blown* AIDS. People who only began aggressive treatment when they got AIDS lasted a lot longer after getting AIDS than people who started taking the drugs earlier (possibly because the virus was getting resistant–a very worrisome suggestion). So the original drug cocktails produced a huge improvement in quality of life, but little improvement in total survival time. It’s really heartening that they’ve changed that.
* I remember noticing that the modifier “full-blown” became very closely associated with “AIDS.” It may be less so now, since the disease features less prominently in news and public discourse than it did 10-20 years ago. But for a while at least, discussions of AIDS must have totally dominated the use of “full-blown.” It really hit me when I saw Trainspotting, which included the line: “Tommy knew he had the virus, like, but never knew he’d gone full-blown.” (This incidentally shows that this linguistic point was not limited to American English. It also reminds me that I felt that Tommy’s experiences were really the central tragedy of the film.)