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Life expectancy of HIV-infected individuals now close to those who are not infected
Global_Citize... Posts: 972	Jul 03, 2008 10:36 PM GMT Quote According to a report published yesterday by the Journal of the American Medical Association, the life expectancy of people infected with HIV is now close to the normal life expectancy of those not infected with HIV. This is good news, obviously. But does it fuel careless behavior? Many people already see HIV/AIDS as a chronic disease and forget how deadly it was just 10 or 20 years ago.

mindgarden Posts: 1433	Jul 04, 2008 2:56 AM GMT Quote Um... that's in the first five years after infection. The study did show a higher rate in the period 5 -10 years after infection, and had no data after that. Still, it did show mortality rates declining in countries with the best available health care.
Dance Posts: 17	Jul 11, 2008 4:42 AM GMT Quote Yet, those kind of treatment to keep your life going is damn expensive...
london_nyc Posts: 330	Jul 11, 2008 4:58 AM GMT Quote Dance saidYet, those kind of treatment to keep your life going is damn expensive... I feel like given the choice between expensive treatment and dying, I wouldd try and find a way to pay for treatment... Still, it should be free. I totally believe in socialised medicine.
zeebyaboi Posts: 522	Jul 14, 2008 2:32 AM GMT Quote I am on the triple cocktail called Atripla. It's a once-a-day pill that has literally saved my life. It costs $1,200 for a one-month supply here in the Good Ol' US of A. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, the generic version of this drug is... drum roll, please... $30 American per month. The same drug in most of Africa is $15 American. The drug companies in the U.S. DON'T want to cure us. They want to keep us paying (or the government paying) for this drug so the CEO's and shareholders can fatten their wallets on the backs of the sick. We Americans are subsidising low-cost funding of this drug for the rest of the world. I don't want anyone to have to deal with this illness, but at the same time, charity begins at home. We need to do something to expose the greed these drug companies are practicing at the expense of our lives.
chicago_barry Posts: 166	Jul 14, 2008 2:43 AM GMT Quote I've had guys approach me to have unsafe sex because they want to get HIV from me. When I try to convince them how stupid this is, they give me the old "oh it's no worse than diabetes" shtick. I know people with diabetes and none of them would have chosen to have it if the couldn't. HIV may be treatable, but the drugs and the virus do a number on your body, and I can't believe I will live as long as I would have had I never gotten infected.
SurrealLife Posts: 4496	Jul 14, 2008 4:47 PM GMT Quote chicago_barry saidI've had guys approach me to have unsafe sex because they want to get HIV from me. When I try to convince them how stupid this is, they give me the old "oh it's no worse than diabetes" shtick. I know people with diabetes and none of them would have chosen to have it if the couldn't. HIV may be treatable, but the drugs and the virus do a number on your body, and I can't believe I will live as long as I would have had I never gotten infected. Stories like this drive me nuts. If a guy ever approached me and said that I would seriously consider boxing his ears just to knock some sense into him. First of all diabetes is not a walk in the park, and secondly the medications for HIV are very expensive and at times have irritating side effects. The amount of ignorance in the gay community about HIV these days is mind-boggling.
a1972guy Posts: 1980	Jul 14, 2008 5:14 PM GMT Quote chicago_barry saidI've had guys approach me to have unsafe sex because they want to get HIV from me. When I try to convince them how stupid this is, they give me the old "oh it's no worse than diabetes" shtick. IDIOTS!!! I swear some people!!!
Bunjamon Posts: 298	Jul 14, 2008 5:23 PM GMT Quote So what does that mean exactly? Thanks to advances in modern medicine AIDS/HIV is no longer a death sentence. That's great news for people who are already living with the disease. But these kinds of studies are only going to put people off their guard, and unsafe sex practices are going to go up, as will the rate of infection. It already HAS started going up in some populaton groups, as recently reported in the NYTimes.
auryn Posts: 1609	Jul 14, 2008 6:03 PM GMT Quote The link is requiring a subscription. Is there an abstract or a few paragraphs that can be posted on here for those of us without subscriptions?
Hidden/Deleted Member	Jul 14, 2008 6:26 PM GMT Quote chicago_barry saidI've had guys approach me to have unsafe sex because they want to get HIV from me. When I try to convince them how stupid this is, they give me the old "oh it's no worse than diabetes" shtick.... UGH!! I HATE that analogy. My little brother has diabetes and at 23 his vision is starting to go. Have you ever seen someone in acute diabetic ketoacidosis. It's pretty damn scary. Never mind the day in and day out blood sugar monitoring. So yeah, sounds like diabetes is a "piece of cake."

Global_Citize... Posts: 972	Jul 14, 2008 10:32 PM GMT Quote Auryn saidThe link is requiring a subscription. Is there an abstract or a few paragraphs that can be posted on here for those of us without subscriptions? It looks like the original article was archived. But I've edited to fix the link above.

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