At the same time, infections attributed to injection drug use or heterosexual contact have risen from 20 percent to 38 percent. Bringing good medical care to poor people, or people with unstable lives, has never been easy. Bringing them triple therapy is turning out to be similarly difficult. The new HIV treatments are now testing the limits of the nation's patchwork, and often charity-dependent, medical system. In that effort lies one of the biggest social and clinical challenges of the epidemic.
Prevention is always the most important victory in the battle against an incurable disease.
That remains as true in the battle against HIV disease as it has always been. Preventing infection is no less urgent in the current era of therapeutic optimism than it was in the long period of pessimism it replaced. In recent years, the task of preventing the spread of HIV in this country has become less national and centrally conceived, and more local and home-grown, than in the past. Many scientists believe only a vaccine has the power to stop, and ultimately reverse, the HIV epidemic worldwide. Current research, however, suggests a good AIDS vaccine is still years away.