Is HIV-AIDS thought of now as a chronic-but-manageable disease, like diabetes?
It is. Whether or not people will have a normal lifespan is yet to be determined. But again, the medications themselves bring so many risks. And it depends on the person: how well they tolerate the meds, what kinds they can be on, how much of the virus you got to begin with, what kind of virus you got to begin with, whether you got more than one type of virus. You could get different strains from me and from someone else, and they may need to be treated differently. As a matter of fact, we tell people who have HIV not to have unsafe sex with each other because they could be passing strains; they could be passing on additional virus which increases your viral load, which makes you sicker. I’ve always said that Stephen King couldn’t have made this one up. Just the fact that it’s such a tricky medical challenge and science challenge, but also that it infects the most disenfranchised populations in our society: the ones that people supposedly care the least about. And I think that kind of
