Quote Originally Posted by PaulBullion View Post
If it is such a big risk, why hasn't it happened more over the past 30 years?

I know you don't intend to fear monger, but please keep in mind that there are people with HIV reading your posts, and you could be causing fear and panic based on no data.
Apologies, I absolutely didn't intend to worry anybody. Although I would stress that it works the other way too, making people think that it's all good now is dangerous. However, yes, I can understand why some people with HIV may have felt unease.

However, it is not based on no data. HIV has a very high mutation rate which exacerbates its potential for resistance inducing mutations, which is why we make drugs to target diseases in multiple ways, or at least one of the reasons. So often you can switch to a class of different drugs and often that is fine, unless you develop further resistance and in some cases you can end up running out of options. So for most people, that is manageable, assuming that people can access all drugs, that they can tolerate side effects of different drugs and that those drugs don't interact with other treatments. We are lucky because drugs being developed now seem to be more robust to resistance. The point of 30 years is irrelevant because, and this is important to stress, every time we see mutation in a virus we have the potential for a problem. It could happen in three weeks or three decades. We have no idea what happens when the next mutation occurs, which is why viral mutation is always a risk, regardless of which drugs we have. This is why my point was that the danger is whether we keep up with HIV, because complacency is dangerous. My point isn't that we are all still screwed (again, apologies if this was the impression) because thankfully we live in a time where our access to and quality of treatment is vastly improved (speaking as somebody in the UK), my point is that that situation can change pretty damn quickly and that sometimes people fall into the idea that we don't need to worry about HIV so much now, which may (I stress may) lead people to not take it quite as seriously. HIV is not finished.