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Comment by emiliobumachar | Hacker News Reader

For those of you too young to remember the 90's, AIDS meant sure death in very few years. It was worse than cancer: with some cancers, you stood a chance.

How far we've come :)

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In more ways than one. It's taken decades if not centuries of study of other diseases to understand them and to develop treatments, and just as much time for treatments to have an impact on incidents of the disease. The study of HIV/AIDS has really shown off how far modern medicine and medical research has come. We were able to understand the disease in a matter of years, and develop some crude but effective treatments almost as quickly. Today HIV has become a treatable chronic condition, though the treatments are costly, and vaccines and cures are being developed as we speak. It's really quite remarkable.

It is remarkable.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_White. There were competing social forces too.

Yes I remember the 90's and how scary it was (the idea of contracting HIV). I wonder how children born in the 90's see it and whether they still view it as we did when we learnt about HIV and Aids in the 90's.

I also remember as a kid the news when Magic johnson made his announcement and thinking , dam he is gonna die really soon, not knowing that decades later he is still doing well.

My understanding is HIV is still more or less a death sentence, with the antiretroviral therapies being relatively effective to push back the final outcome. And there are issues not being discussed here, such as compliance issues with the treatments (adverse reactions and so on) that make patients drop the treatments. It's far from being perfect yet.

It's more of a chronic disease than a death sentence. We all die, and if you push back the final outcome far enough, your odds of dying from something else outgun your odds of dying from HIV/AIDS.

For example, those with HAART-treated HIV infection who have been treated for four years or more tend to die from a non-AIDS-related cause rather than from an AIDS-related one. [1]

[1] = https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20380565

None of us are getting out of here alive. Last I checked, we are all born under a sentence of death.

Yes. A close friend of my family contracted AIDS sometime in the 80s. The person died in the 90s. I was a teenager throughout this time.

My parents were scared out of their minds for my health whenever I went over to play (but they let me). They told me to never drink out of a dirty glass, never touch any blood, etc ... stuff that didn't make any sense to me at the time and a lot of stuff that's incorrect.

Anyway, AIDS meant sure death in those years.

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