‘Triple Therapy drug cocktail’ is a medicine to this disease. Which disease?
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Abstract: Though AIDS still infects about 40,000 people in the United States yearly, the death rate has dropped drastically, and a powerful "triple drug cocktail" has helped change AIDS from being an automatic death sentence to a chronic, but often manageable, disease.
It was spring of 1996 when Beth Bye says she returned from the dead. The Wisconsin woman hadn't actually died, but with her body ravaged in the late stages of AIDS infection, she had run out of options, and death was, indeed, near. AIDS-related dementia and blindness had crept in--signs that her doctor told her meant time was short. She made funeral arrangements and considered moving to a hospice for her remaining days.
Then, as if to say "not so fast," medical science handed her another option. New drugs called protease inhibitors, first approved in 1995, were about to revolutionize the treatment of patients infected with the AIDS virus. These drugs usually are taken with two other drugs called reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The combined drug "cocktail" has helped change AIDS in the last three years from being an automatic death sentence to what is now often a chronic, but manageable, disease.
Within two months of beginning the triple cocktail treatment, also known as highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), Bye's viral load--a measure of new AIDS virus produced in the body--dropped to undetectable levels. Her red and white blood cell counts normalized, an important sign that the immune system was starting to work again. Suddenly she could do simple things she had long given up, such as walk the dog for 2 miles. Bye, now 40, was even able to return to her teaching job and currently works 30 hours a week.