Word: virality
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...once in the history of HIV, a strategy that ought to work seemed in fact to succeed. Within weeks of starting combination therapy, 7 out of 10 men and women with AIDS begin to get better. Blood tests show that in many of them, the viral load has dropped below detectable levels. Relieved of the burden of fighting HIV, their long-suffering immune systems can finally tackle the deadly fungal and bacterial infections that have taken hold in their lungs, intestines and brains. Fevers break; lesions disappear; energy returns...
...what if you could avoid all those problems, Ho wondered. What if you didn't wait until the end stages of the disease but started combination therapy during the first few weeks of the infection, before too many billion viral particles had formed, before resistance became inevitable, before too many billion immune cells had died in the body's defense? Would you have tilted the odds enough in the immune system so that it could wipe out whatever stragglers might be left, wherever they were hiding...
...genre and put at its center the AIDS patient who bounces back on the three-drug cocktail. Over the past year--like a character plucked from a drama and dropped into what, exactly?-- Schwartz moved from one story to the other. His T cells are back above 500. His viral load, meaning the presence of the HIV virus in his blood, has dropped to--the magic words--undetectable levels...
People who work with the epidemic fear that upbeat news coverage is playing havoc with a decade of AIDS education. Doctors complain about patients who think that because their viral load is undetectable, the virus must be gone from their bodies. Wrong. AIDS counselors talk about teens who think that science has discovered a morning-after pill to undo last night's unsafe doings. It hasn't. And everybody is concerned that a false message will go out that AIDS has been defeated. With that, they figure, will come a return to the '70s, the whole goatish and unbuckled funfest...
AIDS has increased gay visibility and even gay acceptance; AIDS is the Chorus Line of epidemics. The new drug treatments and those still in the pipeline are tremendously promising, although the catchphrase "reduced viral load" somehow sounds like a favorite band of Beavis and Butt-head. A generation has been all but erased. AIDS has paradoxically proved that gay lives matter, that the days when President Reagan refused even to say "AIDS" in public are past. Perhaps the post-plague years will soon begin and all those quilt panels and ribbons and T shirts will become relics or even flea...