The panic and foreboding that was present decades ago when AIDS first crept into our consciousness is starting to be felt again for it was just announced that a new strain of AIDS has been detected in a New York City man.
While HIV strains that are resistant to some drug treatments have been on the rise in recent years throughout the United States, city officials said this case was unique and worrisome for several reasons.
First, they said, the strain of the disease was resistant to three of the four classes of drugs used to treat HIV from the moment the patient got sick. Typically, drug resistance comes after a patient is treated with retroviral drugs, often because they go off the prescribed course. And, more often than not, a person is only resistant to one or two classes of drugs.
But the resistance comes in combination with its rapid transformation into AIDS. Each of those things has been seen before, but never together.
In this case, the patient developed AIDS from 2 to 10 months after being infected. Usually, it takes 10 years for the average person infected with HIV to develop AIDS.
At a news conference at New York’s health department, where Frieden was joined by nearly a dozen doctors and community leaders, several people recalled having that same worried feeling they had more than two decades ago, when AIDS first started appearing.
Posted by TangoMan at 05:50 PM