It’s a battle won but the war is not over. In Europe and North America, the life expectancy of patients infected with the AIDS virus has increased by ten years, thus approaching that of the general population (78 years): 73 years for men and 76 years for the women.
The study, published in The Lancet HIVrelayed by theAFP and several information sites, is based on data from 88,504 patients from 18 countries in Europe and North America who started treatment between 1996 and 2010.
The year 1996 corresponds to the arrival of tritherapies. These “combinations of antiretrovirals have been used in the treatment of AIDS for 20 years, underlines Adam Trickey, one of the authors of the study (University of Bristol), but recent drugs have fewer side effects, require taking a lower number of cachets, more prevent the virus from reproducing and resisting treatment”.
Moreover, the more recent the dates of entry into the disease, the more the number of deaths linked to the virus decreases.
But according to experts, it is no longer the improvement of treatments that will reduce patient mortality. For Adam Trickey, “we must now focus on issues related to the proper monitoring of treatments, the late diagnosis of HIV infection and the diagnosis and treatment of associated conditions”.
For twenty years, science has made it possible to counter the virus by preventing it from reproducing and collapsing the immune system, it must now allow patients to free themselves from it.
And the international community must pursue the battle of the South with more determination. In Africa, life expectancy is 60 years with great disparities from one country to another.
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