Before the gold standard in HIV treatment—called HAART, for “highly active antiretroviral therapy”—came along in the mid-90s, untreated people could expect to live about 10 years after they were infected by HIV. HAART, a combination of several HIV drugs, transformed HIV from a death sentence to a chronic, survivable condition, prolonging life by several decades. Within two years of becoming available, it lowered HIV mortality rates by 80 percent.
A New York Times story from 2001 describes how radically the introduction of this combination therapy changed HIV-positive peoples’ thinking and priorities:
Assuming that their days were numbered in the hundreds, some quit their jobs, took their savings and spent what they had to make the most of their remaining time. Only now, with an ever-evolving regimen of drugs, many are not dying and instead, like Mr. Schliemann, are living full lives.
Now, a new NBER working paper suggests the treatment also gave a group of HIV-positive women a new lease on life—so much so that some of them quit using drugs and left their physically abusive partners.
For the study, the researchers looked a group of largely minority, low-income women in the Women’s Interagency HIV Study, a longitudinal study that began in 1994, and measured their mental and physical health, as well as rates of drug abuse and the amount of domestic violence they experienced, before and after the introduction of HAART.
[For more of this story, written by Olga Khazan, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/he...tic-violence/519048/]
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