Study: AIDS Drugs Slash Death Rates by 80 Percent
Reuters
Patricia Reaney
October 16, 2003
HIV/AIDS drug cocktails have slashed death rates from the disease by more than 80 percent, and now most patients on the drugs can expect to live for more than a decade and perhaps longer, scientists said on Friday. Death rates were halved shortly after the availability of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART), and declined by more than 80 percent by 2001.
"Nine out of 10 people could expect to live for 10 years regardless of the age at which they became infected. We haven't reached the medium yet so it could be 17 or 20 years - we can't really say at the moment," said Dr. Kholoud Porter of Britain's Medical Research Council.
Before HAART, only about half of HIV-infected people could expect to be alive ten years later, and fewer than half if they were over 40 when infected. Older people on HAART do not have a reduced life expectancy, but the study shows that injecting drug users (IDUs) are four times more likely to die of AIDS than men infected through sexual contact.
Porter said long-term follow-up of HIV/AIDS patients is essential because the drugs are toxic and patients are showing resistance to them. "We hope we go on seeing survival improvements and that people infected with HIV will end up having the same survival expectations as people who are [HIV] negative," he said.
Although HAART has extended the lives of AIDS patients in countries where people can afford the expensive treatments, treatment is still scarce in poor nations. In September, drug companies said they had doubled the supply of AIDS medicine to Africa, where an estimated 4.1 million people desperately need treatment. At the end of June 2003, 76,300 Africans were receiving cut-price HAART drugs from six pharmaceutical firms.