When Cliff Lane, Henry Masur, and I were taking care of patients with HIV in the early 1980s prior to the availability of AZT, the median survival of our patients was roughly nine to ten months from the time they were diagnosed. This meant that 50 percent of our patients would be dead within that time frame. By 2007, more than ten years after effective combination anti-HIV therapy became available, a modeling study in the United States and Canada found that if a twenty-year-old individual with HIV was put on combination antiretroviral therapy, that person could be expected to live into their
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