Good News and Bad About Aids

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Introduction

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Overview

There has been a subtle change in the nature of AIDS. Contracting the disease still means certain death, but doctors and patients have stopped sitting around waiting for it to happen. That's because with aggressive medical care, people infected with the virus that causes AIDS—called HIV, for human immunodeficiency virus—can prolong their health and their lives. In fact, new drug therapies may be turning HIV infection into a long-term chronic problem that some day may be akin to diabetes: a serious disease, but one you can live with if you treat it properly.

Almost from the beginning of the epidemic, AIDS patients have taken medical care into their own hands. They have demanded treatment, and they have set up underground networks to obtain unapproved but promising AIDS drugs. At first, the medical establishment objected, but now, in many ways, it has come around. The federal government is giving its approval for the use of many more experimental drugs, and it has opened up some of its own testing programs to allow greater access to AIDS drugs still in clinical trials,