What happens if someone who is HIV-positive takes on antiretroviral medication? : NPR

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The AIDS medication and treatments by many countries are partially paid by US foreign support. The rescue of millions of human life has been attributed over the years through a long -term program. But last week the Trump administration freezed and used a stop work order for most US foreign support.

Since then, clinics in South Africa and in other countries in which people have decided their medication, put down the staff and even close their doors. For those who rely on AIDS medication on them, they must suspend the treatment. And as Ari Daniel reports, stopping this treatment for the patient and the broader goal of keeping HIV transmission under control can lead to problems.

Ari Daniel, Byline: HIV was once a death sentence, but antiretroviral medication that was taken as a daily cocktail enables people to live a relatively healthy life.

Susan Cu-Uvin: It does not mean that they are healed by HIV, but it controls the amount of virus in your body so that you don’t get very sick.

Daniel: Susan Cu-Uvin heads the Providence/Boston Center for AIDS research. She says the medication kill the virus at different points in her life cycle and prevent it from replicating it. They are so effective that the HIV broadcasts between sex partners and mothers to children have dropped.

Cu-Uvin: Every person who has HIV has received a life. The termination of antiretroviral therapy means death.

Daniel: And that’s why. Let us assume someone takes up his HIV medication, and for some reason they get up. The drug level falls into your body. Then the virus comes out of the hiding place. Chris Beyrer heads the Duke Global Health Institute.

Chris Beyrer: There are viral HIV reservoirs in the body. We don’t know where they are all, but either way the virus will come back.

Daniel: This means that the patient settles their medication with a terrible flu within days or weeks after taking a person.

Beyrer: You are painful. You have night sweat. You have a fever. And some people – you may have the feeling that you buy HIV again with a rash and a high fever, headache and nausea.

Daniel: The disease will then progress.

Beyrer: After all, all of these people will develop clinical AIDS and the very serious complications such as opportunistic infections from which a healthy immune system protects them.

Daniel: Everything, from shingles to mushroom and parasitic infections to Africa and Asia, tuberculosis – everyone can kill someone without a functioning immune system. But here is the other problem with the end of anti -retroviral treatment. During the period in which the pharmaceutical levels drop in the body and the virus values ​​increase, the virus is most likely to be resistant.

Beyrer: Because you don’t have enough medication in your body to completely suppress replication – and if you develop resistance to one of these antiviral areas, you are generally resistant to the entire class.

Daniel: Forcing someone to go to a second or third line regime of drugs that are more expensive and heavier to get – plus …

Beyrer: If you have a resistant virus, you can transfer it.

Daniel: These are the reasons why experts in public health like Susan Cu-Uvin are so concerned.

Cu-Uvin: The virus comes back in revenge without antiretroviral therapy.

Daniel: And without intervention, she says, the death of AIDS is almost certain. I am Ari Daniel for NPR messages.

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