HAART Turns The Tide On AIDS

Date

1996

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

Global

Era

Contemporary

Significance

Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) transformed AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable chronic illness, a breakthrough unveiled at the International AIDS Conference in Vancouver in July 1996.

Researchers including David Ho showed that combining three or more antiretroviral drugs into a "cocktail" could suppress HIV to undetectable levels, halting the virus's ability to mutate around any single medication. The effect on patients was so dramatic that clinicians spoke of the "Lazarus effect," as people who had been wasting away and preparing to die regained weight, strength, and years of life. In wealthy countries AIDS deaths plummeted within a couple of years, ending the terror that had haunted the epidemic since the early 1980s. The triumph was bittersweet: the drugs were initially extraordinarily expensive, out of reach for the millions infected in sub-Saharan Africa and the developing world, igniting a fierce global battle over patents, generics, and access that would define AIDS activism into the next decade. Still, HAART ranks among the century's great medical achievements, proving that a once-uniformly fatal viral disease could be tamed by science and giving millions a future.

Empires active in 1996

• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE

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Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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