Seeing the widespread ignorance and lack of knowledge regarding HIV is disturbing here. Also a special shoutout to this
@GumNaam guy for his pathetic, disgraceful and laughable attempt of creating misinformation which I can understand is partly due to his biased nature towards India.
To start with please do not use HIV and AIDS interchangeably. They are different things. HIV is virus that can cause AIDS. HIV causes the CD4 cells to decrease and if the count goes below 200, the body becomes prone to very common infections and cancer and that condition is known as Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS.
Trust me when I say we haven't seen the true horror of this disease. People who lived through the 1980's and 1990's would have seen what this condition really was when scores of predominantly young gay men in west were just dying of cancers namely leukemia, Kaposi Sarcoma and common infections from bacterias and fungus. Then came ART which controlled the disease and increased the cd4 count back to normalcy.
From then to now a lot of advancement has happened in the field of HIV medicine with different classes of medicines for HIV. For HIV medicines to fail completely the virus has to acquire resistance to at least 3-4 lines of treatment which is very rare nowadays. Another thing which has reduced is the toxicity of the medicines. There are better tolerated by people now.This year scientists developed injectable medicines which can be taken once a month and this is a very big thing as till now people had to take the medicine daily and if they forget a single dose they carry the risk of virus gaining resistance. One more thing to recently happen in this space is two people got cured of their HIV. Although the procedure through which they went through was a very harsh and risky one and cannot be availed for common population but scientists are very close to replicate the mechanism through gene editing and other avenues. There are a lot of more exciting research going on. I wish I could elucidate all of them in this post but lets leave that for another time. But even on the safer side I am assuming we will get at least a functional cure by 2025.
Now coming to claims of this gumnaam our self proclaimed statistician who came up with the figure of 20 million infected by HIV through his highly proclaimed mathematical model. The Indian figure of 2 million by NACO is a very accurate one. Even the most conservative models by scientist put the figure to be 3-4 million. Although I believe the figure to be around ~ 3 million as most of the people in India with HIV the late 1990's and early 2000's unfortunately died with the condition.
India is seen as a leader in manufacturing cheap HIV medicines by completely disregarding western patents and for this very reason the African and other poor countries look towards India for cheap generic medicines.
This is one of the worst epidemics mankind has faced due to which 40 million people perished and another 40 million are suffering.
How do I know all this stuff? I plan to open an NGO for people suffering with HIV this year or next year. I want everyone here to empathise with these people suffering social, mental ,physical all kinds of hardship one can imagine.
