What is a “cocktail”?
A “cocktail,” also known as combination therapy, means taking two or more anti-retroviral drugs together to fight HIV. Before the past decade or so, most people were just given prescriptions of a single drug to fight the virus, such as AZT. With these commonly prescribed dosages of a single drug, the amount of HIV (the viral load) in the blood generally lowered by about seventy percent. With the combined effort of one or more of these older drugs with newer ones, such as some of the protease inhibitors, people’s viral loads have lowered by as much as ninety-nine percent or more. Most HIV treatments now involve several different drugs, and these combination therapies have helped many people live much longer and healthier lives.
