In a recent study at Bristol University in UK, a new drug discovered can fortunately add up to 10 years of life expectancy for the people suffering from HIV. This is specially a good news, for the young people suffering from this ailment, since the discovery of life saving new drug means that these patients can live a decade longer.
This new drug will be used in antiretroviral therapy used from 20 years to treat the patients suffering with HIV. The antiretroviral therapy is actually the usage of a combination of three or more different drug given to patients for controlling and lowering the spread of the virus and ultimately stops the body immune system from complete damage.
According to Adam Trickey, a medical statistician at the University of Bristol said that, their research entails the process that how screening, prevention and treatment of health problems associated with infection can considerably increase the life of affected.
He also added that, new drugs would be acting in multiple ways that first it would means taking fewer pills, which means having lesser side effects on the human body and also stopping the virus from developing resistant to the drugs. He also said that, further research and exploration is required in the coming time to bring the life expectancy of such patient to the match of the general population.
Other researcher focusing on the dreadful conditions that prevail in developing countries it was said there exist a need to develop some fine strategies that would help the population to have greater access to the sources of treatments for HIV.
HIV infection which is sadly a one of the major cause of deaths in the world, where, people living in the third-world countries suffers the most with infection either due to lack of quality or improper treatment given to patients. Also there exists a lack of medical information regarding the prevention of the disease among the population in this region.
The main motivation behind this research as described the research team is to combat the stigma associated with the `HIV AIDS infection. According to the team, better treatment would help the patients leads smooth life as much as possible and also to encourage people to adhere to the treatment soon after the diagnosis.
The research team collected the data of 88,500 HIV patients from 18 different countries of European and North American studies and it was found that, fewer people died in the first three years of their treatment from 2008 to 2010 as compared to more death recorded for people starting their treatment between 1996 and 2007. The same study also showed that, life expectancy for both male and female 20 years old have been increased by nine and ten years respectively since 2013.
However the real challenge according to Jimmy WhitWorth, professor of international health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine is to spread and translate the success of this discovery to other parts of the world. According to him this is good news, but when looking from a global perspective, Africa shares the huge burden for this disease where diagnosis and treatment is still a problem.
Jimmy tends to be right in his view since according to the UNAIDS report, the total number of HIV patients in 2015 was 37 million and out of which only 17 millions were receiving antiretroviral therapy.Therefore the real challenge is to spread its viability to other part of the world as well.