.I.V. drugs slowly followed AZT onto drugstore shelves, and doctors began to treat patients with combinations of the most potent ones. In 1996, a set of powerful drugs called the protease inhibitors was released, and the picture of AIDS in the United States began to change.Terminally ill people treated with combinations of protease inhibitors and older drugs -- a medication "cocktail" that often required them to take dozens of pills and capsules a day at precisely timed intervals -- suddenly began to regain their health, and the statistics of AIDS in the United States began to change dramatically.In 1996 the death rate from AIDS in the US was 23% less than in 1995, and in 1997 it fell again by more than 40%. The new drug combinations could also stop healthy people who were H.I.V. infected from getting sick with AIDS, and rates of new AIDS cases began to fall--by 6% in 1996, 15% in 1997, and about 25% in 1998. The new drug combinations have worked so well in some people with AIDS that doctors predict they may survive for years or even decades despite their disease, living normal lives as people do with other chronic treatable conditions like diabetes or high blood pressure. But for many other infected people, the new drugs are only a beginning. H.I.V. is a virus with thousands of different strains and mutations, and it can develop resistance to drugs very quickly. About half the people who initially respond to drug combinations may stop responding because the virus in their bloodstream has grown tolerant to the drugs they are taking. And, more importantly, while the new anti-H.I.V. treatments have made a big difference in the shape of the AIDS epidemic in the United States and Europe, at $15,000 or more a year they are far too expensive for use in the impoverished countries of Africa and Asia, where the vast majority of the world's H.I.V. infected people live. For these countries, the best hope against AIDS lies in the development of a v...
