There are about 900,000 people with HIV in the United States altogether right now. The majority are aware of their HIV status, but only perhaps 250,000 of these people are on consistent medications to help fight HIV.
What is drug-resistant HIV?
Drug-resistant HIV is HIV virus in a person that has partial to complete resistance to medications that are currently available for HIV treatment. In other words, the medications are no longer as effective or effective at all in treating the virus.
How does drug resistance happen?
The most common way it happens is when people miss medicine doses consistently. Often the virus will actually become resistant to the medicine, just the same way that, if you were given a treatment for an ear infection and didn't take the antibiotic consistently, missing a lot of doses, then often the infection doesn't respond as well to the antibiotic. You would then have to go on much more potent antibiotics and longer courses of treatment to cure the infection.
How many people who are currently in treatment are experiencing drug resistance?
In the study that we're doing up here at our hospitals, we're seeing about 30 percent of people with resistant virus. There's a report that's just coming out from UCLA. Their estimates are that in San Francisco, according to different analyses that they've used, by the year 2005, forty-two percent of all of the people in San Francisco who are HIV positive will not respond to current therapy.
