Statistics like the Russian ones are actually pretty frightening, when one thinks about weakness of the government response to the issue it looks like they intervened somewhat but not nearly enough, I bet it gets a lot worse before it gets better.
Wow.
I’m sorry, but you have been misinformed.
As already mentioned, there is no cure.
There are treatments that can turn it into sort of a chronic disease, but it doesn’t go away. Those treatments have to be taken daily for the rest of the person’s life. There is a cost to them. They have side effects.
Short term side effects - meaning you feel these almost immediately, not that you have them for only a short time. They can continue indefinitely:
[ul]
[li]fatigue/exhaustion[/li][li]Nausea[/li][li]Vomiting[/li][li]Diarrhea[/li][li]Headache[/li][li]Fever[/li][li]Muscle pain[/li][li]Dizziness [/li][li]Insomnia[/li][/ul]
Long term side effects:
[ul]
[li]Kidney problems, including kidney failure[/li][li]Liver damage[/li][li]Heart disease[/li][li]Diabetes or insulin resistance[/li][li]An increase in fat levels in the blood (hyperlipidemia)[/li][li]Changes in how the body uses and stores fat (lipodystrophy)[/li][li]Weakening of the bones[/li][li]Nervous system and psychiatric effects, including insomnia, dizziness, depression, and suicidal thoughts[/li][/ul]
The dry nature of those lists don’t convey the scope of some of these problem. Lipodystrophy, for example, can be downright disfiguring.
So it’s still a freakin’ serious disease and no fun to have.
Well I mean technically wasn’t it cured in at least one guy who underwent a bone marrow transplant where the donor who bad both of the delta 32 mutations on the CCR5 receptor gene or whatnot? I know that’s not a practical “cure”. The interesting thing at least according to wiki is it may actually be because he had the graft-versus-host disease complication and it said this may be what actually killed off the HIV virus in his cells.
I remember seeing Princess Diana sitting at the bedside of an AIDS patient and reaching out to hold his hand. Some people were freaked that she would do that, touch a very sick man, and(shudder) a gay man at that!
In the early 90’s I attended the funeral of a man I’d met only once. He was the friend of a friend and suffered from Karposi’s Syndrome, one of those opportunistic diseases that popped up when a person’s immune system was damaged by AIDS, my friend wanted a lot of support for the family at the funeral, because this was back when the WBC was at the height of their funeral picketing. I went outside to take some photos of the WBC and ended up seeing myself on TV, as the Phelps got coverage then.
A lot of people were scared to be in the presence of AIDS patients back then.
when AIDS was first beginning to be recognised, I was working as a transport manager in the NHS. We had a patient diagnosed locally and I had to arrange for the collection of all the bio-hazardous material from his home. They treated him at home because it was regarded as too dangerous to move him to a hospital.
My driver had to wear a full hazmat suit and everything was sealed in multiple bags to go straight to an incinerator, The van was steamed out after every collection. I was pretty happy when the poor guy died only a couple of weeks later.
A few months later I went to a seminar where we were told that the virus does not last long outside a body; hospital staff suddenly became a lot more conscientious about wearing gloves and cleaning up blood spills.