isted for the diseases that resulted. Over the past 10 years, however, researchers have developed new drugs to fight both HIV infection and its infections and cancers that are often associated . The Food and Drug Administration has now approved a number of drugs for treating HIV infection. The first group of drugs used to treat HIV infection, called nucleoside reverse transcriptase (RT) inhibitors, interrupts an early stage of the virus making copies of itself. Included in this class of drugs is AZT. AZT was released for widespread use in 1987 and was not found to be very successful in treating patients that were already infected with the virus but was remarkably effective in keeping it from passing from mother to baby. (Odets, 125)More recently, a second class of drugs has been approved for treating HIV infection. These drugs, called protease inhibitors, interrupt virus replication at a later step in its life cycle. They include ritonavir (Norvir), saquinivir (Invirase). Because HIV can become resistant to both classes of drugs, a combination treatment using both is often necessary to effectively suppress the virus. Patients are given what is known as a cocktail of many different drugs which requires them to take dozens of pills a day at precisely timed intervals (Wadhams, 119). Unfortunately, HIV is a disease that has thousands of different strains and mutations and can quickly develop immunity to different drugs, so the medication must be changed regularly to ensure that it is actually helping the patient. Paul Verna states, Even though these cocktails can have serious side effects, they are frequently a patients only hope for survival (61). Although major medical advances have been made towards a cure for this terrible disease, the numbers of people infected each year are astounding. At the end of 1999 6.4 million Americans had died from AIDS, and 1.8 million of those were children under the age of 15 (Wadhams, 237). AIDS is not a s...
