Is HIV a manageable chronic disease?
If caught early enough, and treated, a person can live almost an entire lifespan, says HealthMaker Anthony Fauci, MD. He explains how a diagnosis of HIV went from a death sentence to a manageable chronic disease.
Transcript
At the time that I began admitting them to our hospital here, the median survival was six to eight months.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
When I first began taking care of HIV-infected individuals right here at the NIH in the--
I started literally, within weeks to a month or two after the first cases were reported,
I became fascinated and was convinced that this was truly a new disease that was going to get out of control.
I didn't know what it was. I knew it was infectious. I knew that it was sexually transmitted. But I had no idea what the etiology was.
So I turned around the direction of my career and started studying these patients. And at the time that I began admitting them to our hospital
here, the median survival was six to eight months, which means that 50% of your patients
would be dead in six to eight months. And that was because almost all of them didn't come in and were noticed to have AIDS until they were already
far advanced whereas now we know from years of experience that you can get infected and go for several years doing
reasonably well. So all we were seeing was advanced patients. Now if you look at the combinations of drugs
that have been developed and when used in combination of three or more reasonably early enough in the course of a person's infection
so that they haven't already devastated their immune system, you can do a mathematical modeling
of predicting that if a 25-year-old person gets infected, and within a reasonable period
of time from the initiation of the infection, they go on a typical combination antiretroviral therapy,
that they would live an additional 5-0, 50 years, so that you can live till you're in your 70s, which
is almost a normal lifespan. So it is entirely correct to say that with the current therapies
and the current care we have available that we've actually converted HIV into a manageable chronic disease.
hiv aids
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