4-11-09 Vanessa Dang

From the onset, I was interested by the comment that ART increases the life expectancy of people living with HIV/AIDS, and therefore also increases the population size that is infected with HIV, resulting overall in an increased duration and prevalence of HIV in a community. Although the article didn’t go into more detail about this supposed problem, I was interested to learn from the table that drug-resistant strains were less transmissible than wild-type strains, but also that they could revert back to the wild-type strains. At the same time, the results of many of these studies conflict with each other. For example, while some considered drug resistance to be negligible, the study in Botswana and India projected that in 30 years, the accumulation of drug resistance would render ART useless. Overall, it seems that there is still much for us to research and discover, pointing to the complexity of HIV treatment and management.