Health

The very word AIDS strikes fear into the hearts of nearly every person on this planet. The disease has been around for atleast a decade and even though we have been able to understand it, there has been very little knowledge about how the disease can be treated.  The statistics are also very scary with millions of infected people all over the world actively being infected with HIV nearly every minute and millions more of the already infected desperately waiting for some hope in the form of treatments.

The race is now on to find some sort of permanent cure for the disease before it destroys the millions of infected patients all over the world.

Major pharmaceutical companies acknowledge that research into the treatment and cure of HIV AIDS can be expensive. But the fact is that the company which succeeds in finding something other than the current range of antivirals could very well become swamped with money to develop and process the cure.  At present, the push is on in the areas of blood testing, molecular virology, and the replication process of the virus to find some way of killing the virus or severely limiting its spread. If the virus cannot be contained or killed, the aim is them to ensure that the virus cannot replicate to kill normal body lymphocytes.

Scientists also have decided to collaborate to fund their respective AIDS research projects so that information can be shared among several research projects. One reason that scientists are finding it difficult to treat the virus is because it goes into hiding inside perfectly normal CD4 lymphocytes. The virus then progresses to slowly destroy the host while using the cell materials to build carbon copies of itself. Scientists are trying to collect these cells from the peripheral blood stream and culture them to prepare some type of medication or drug which will prevent the viral cells from breaking open. Scientists are also encouraging prevention of the disease at present to control the number of people with the disease. Preventive measures should be enforced strictly till some type of cure can be found.

HIV medication at present!

At present, there is a whole range of anti-AIDS medication that is commonly prescribed to prevent the virus from replicating. This is called as anti-retroviral therapy. The drugs do work to control the virus from replicating and irreversibly damaging the body cells. But the main catch with this treatment is that the drugs are expensive and hard-to-get in under-developed countries like Africa. Governments of developing countries are working hard to make these drugs easily available and at a fraction of the cost. Merck, a major pharmaceutical company, reduced the price of Crivixian to make it more affordable to the masses. Other companies like Abbot have also stepped up to help out with the challenge with reductions in the prices of drugs like Kaletra to make it more affordable to the masses and poorer nations.

The US has also approved generic formulations of the same anti-viral medications that could make the whole group of medication cheap and readily available for the masses.

That is the best we can hope for till a cure is found!

Tags: CD4 lymphocytes, Medications for AIDS, Medications for HIV