With HIV, Where You Live Decides Your Life

There are few words that invoke terror to patients like HIV. The very nature of the virus makes for shivers in those who undergo testing to make sure they are free of it. Today though there is hope. If you live in the right part of the world.

With the new drugs out there a person with HIV doesn't have to start payments on their funeral right away. It's becoming a disease that you deal with like a diabetic deals with insulin. If you live in the right part of the globe. Michael Lederman, of Case Western Reserve University told the International AIDS Society Conference in Sydney about the hopes and lessening death rate.

"I have been doing HIV care since 1983," he told a press conference at the fourth International AIDS Society Conference in Sydney. "And in those days I would regularly see my patients die. Life expectancy was short.

"I wouldn't even tell my patients who enjoyed cigarettes to stop smoking because it didn't seem to make a lot of sense if we were talking about survival in terms of months and a few years.

"But now we are talking about a fairly robust life expectancy."

While the life expectancy for a person infected with HIV was not quite the same as normal, the major health risks for his patients were the same as those as those facing the general population such as heart disease, Lederman said.

"So the future is a little uncertain but it is so bright, so bright compared to what it was 10, 15, 20 years ago," he said.

If you don't you know that you've been handed down a death sentence. In Asia or Africa a person with HIV will live a short and painful life. Their families may have already gotten a death sentence also because by the time it has shown up it's by in your system for a while. Brian Gazzard, founder and chair of the British HIV Association agreed with Lederman that in the developed world HIV is now a controllable condition. That though is only in that portion of the world.

I don't agree at all. I think the HIV epidemic is essentially uncontrolled. It is uncontrolled in Africa, it is uncontrolled completely in Asia really at the moment," he told the press conference.

"I think the scale of the endeavour to actually beat this epidemic, nobody has started to really conceive of yet."

The one thing though that the world has now that wasn't around in the beginnings of the HIV/AIDS is hope. There is hope that one day AIDS will not be a death sentence. That if someone hears the diagnoses they can calmly look at their doctor and ask what drugs should they be talking. Like with heart disease or GERD. It may be years away, but still there is that hope. Craig McClure, executive director of the International AIDS Society is more realistic,

"There is a possibility that we could overcome this disease," he said.

"We are at a point where we could begin to begin ending the epidemic or we could begin to go down a very negative track where people assume that there are enough resources now and the problem is over. And it certainly isn't."