In this week's episode of ER , an HIV positive woman stops taking medication to suppress the disease because she's experiencing serious side effects. Unfortunately, these medications aren't a cure for the disease, and they do have some drawbacks.
Some people experience serious side effects and the drugs are expensive.
Dr. Deyton, the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control, the United States Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health provided the following information. Combination therapy, which has been widely available to people who are HIV positive since 1996, generally refers to the use of protease inhibitors in combination with AZT and similar drugs. People with HIV are living longer and healthier lives. In fact, AIDS related deaths declined 46 percent from 31,130 to 16,685 between 1996 and 1997, in large part because of these highly effective medications. Protease inhibitors, a new class of drugs that interfere with the last stage of HIV replication, are the most powerful anti-HIV drugs available to date.