New and Improved HIV - Can Kill You Faster Than Ever!

I spent several hours tonight volunteering for an organization that provides housing for men, women and children living with HIV/AIDS. I came home and started browsing my usual online haunts and stumbled across this bit of alarming news.

Doctors discover new HIV strain

While HIV strains that are resistant to some drug treatments have been on the rise in recent years throughout the United States, city officials said this case was unique and worrisome for several reasons.

First, they said, the strain of the disease was resistant to three of the four classes of drugs used to treat HIV from the moment the patient got sick. Typically, drug resistance comes after a patient is treated with retroviral drugs, often because they go off the prescribed course. And, more often than not, a person is only resistant to one or two classes of drugs.

But the resistance comes in combination with its rapid transformation into AIDS. Each of those things has been seen before, but never together.

In this case, the patient developed AIDS from 2 to 10 months after being infected. Usually, it takes 10 years for the average person infected with HIV to develop AIDS.

I am really afraid that this nostalgic return to the 1980's is going to turn from legwarmers and Izods to public hysteria and weekly funerals.