HIV Treatment

There is currently no cure or vaccine for HIV or aids.

Once HIV enters the blood stream and gets into a white blood cell it physically integrates itself into the genetic material of that cell in order to reproduce. With current medical knowledge, there is no way to reverse this process and get the virus out of the body.

However, drugs do exist that can inhibit the lifecycle of HIV and slow down the damage to your immune system. For those people who have become ill through opportunistic infections (OIs), there are drugs available to relieve symptoms and sometimes cure specific infections. The most commonly used and successful treatments are 'combination' therapies called HAART (Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy). These are drug regimes that use two or more drugs in combination to fight the virus; each of the drugs is designed to fight HIV at different stages of its lifecycle

Unfortunately, these drugs can be extremely expensive so they're unavailable to many people in countries where there is no national health service and the individual must meet the cost of their drugs themselves. HIV is a virus that quickly mutates and, if medication doses are missed, infected people can become immune to their current tablets and even to whole classes of drugs meaning that they have to change their drug regime to more expensive (and sometimes more toxic) medications.

As HIV drugs are so powerful, it is often the case that people get side effects. Fortunately, for many people with HIV, these effects diminish over time and with new medications becoming available every year, the drug load (the number of tablets taken by a person) has reduced for people with HIV in recent years; many take only 2 or 3 tablets per day.

If you are taking medication and are having problems with keeping to your drug regimen or are having side effects, you should talk to your HIV health care provider about coping strategies or alternative medication.

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