Believed to have originated in Africa, AIDS has now become an epidemic, infecting tens of millions of people across the world. What leads to the death of the infected, are the patients’ plundered immune system leaving them vulnerable to a range of infections that may prove fatal.
The culprits are the AIDS causing viruses — human immunodeficiency virus.
True, AIDS is curable. But, to leave the infected safe of other killer-infections, until they are cured, researchers are trying to come up with a remedy.
To reduce the amount of virus in an AIDS patient’s body, needed to boost the immune system, doctors have come up with a ‘life-extending drug therapy’ — cocktails of AIDS drugs.
In a telephone interview, Dr. Amanda Mocroft of Royal Free and University College Medical School in London said,
I think it’s very encouraging that if people can respond to treatment well enough and can suppress the virus for long enough, we have sufficient evidence to say their CD4 counts can return to normal.
Our previous understanding was that there was a plateau in CD4 counts so that CD4 counts would stop increasing after a sufficiently long time taking combination therapy.
A combination of at least three AIDS drugs has successfully returned the immune cells — CD4 T-cells - of infected patients to normal levels.
Thus, since it is not possible to eradicate the disease, the 40 million people infected across the globe — mostly in Africa - ‘the other-disease-risks’ at least can now be kept extremely low with the use of the new ‘cocktail of drugs’.
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