Re: Is there any development in a treatment for HIV/AIDS yet?

Hi Tj,

There's nothing weird about your question at all - it's an interesting, relevant question about what's still a very serious medical problem.

The short answer to your question is that there are many treatments available to combat HIV/AIDS, lessen the symptoms and extend the lifespan of sufferers, but there is still no cure or effective vaccine. To understand why, you need to know a little about how the disease is caused. HIV stands for human immunodeficiency virus. The HIV virus is a type of virus called a retrovirus. This means that its genetic material is made from a molecule called RNA (unlike the genetic material in you and I, which is DNA). When HIV enters a cell, it replicates by copying its RNA into DNA, using an enzyme called reverse transcriptase. It turns out that this enzyme is not very good at copying RNA accurately and this causes a lot of variation (or mutation) in the new copies of the virus. So HIV is continually changing - the virus isolated from one patient at different times can be very different and this makes it very hard to treat.

Many drugs have been developed to inhibit the virus. Perhaps the most famous of these is zidovudine, or AZT, which inhibits the replication of the viral RNA. Another class of drugs are protease inhibitors, which stop the virus from processing its proteins properly so it cannot assemble itself in the cell. However, because of the rapid mutation rate of HIV, it eventually becomes resistant to a lot of these drugs. Most people have to take a cocktail of many drugs in combination to deal with all the variants of the virus in their body. And because AIDS weakens the immune system, HIV patients are very susceptible to secondary infections and diseases.

There is an awful lot of information available about HIV, AIDS, research and treatments. I would recommend AIDS Treatment News, Project Inform and their publications about treatments and for more complicated scientific information, HIV Databases. Don't be afraid to ask questions, raise issues with people or find out as much as you can about this topic - better understanding by everybody is all part of the battle against the disease.