Writers Pool More than two years ago, several leading HIV researchers proposed that the best HIV treatment strategy was to simultaneously challenge HIV with the best available drugs in three different classes. Their recommendations made absolute scientific sense then and make even more sense now. Yet their recommendations are still largely ignored. Because doctors, community treatment publications, and government agencies get most of their HIV treatment data from drug companies.
Drug companies develop data very carefully to support marketing their specific drug.
As a result, current treatment recommendations continue to follow a fairly minimalist treatment strategy of treating with just two classes of drugs in most patients. Now more than ever, people with HIV need basic knowledge of HIV and the three classes of anti-HIV drugs so that they can make better treatment choices. In this column, I will try to give a simplified but accurate picture of HIV and how currently available classes of anti-HIV treatments work. Before HIV enters a cell, these elements are contained in doubled-layered outer coat which is shed when HIV enters the cell. The HIV genome is extremely small, only 9,200 base-pairs or letters long, coding about seven genes.