When the world faced the devastating viral scourge of HIV more than two decades ago, science saved the day. Or so it seemed to some.
Cases of disease associated with HIV infection started popping up in the US by the early 1980s, and by the late 1990s HIV/AIDS had claimed more than 400,000 lives in the country. Then, with the dawn of a new millennium approaching, drug makers won a flurry of approvals from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the antiretroviral (ARV) drugs that would transform the fight against HIV/AIDS. As ARVs became widely available as part of drug cocktails, the overall death rate from HIV/AIDS plummeted. In the US and elsewhere, the pharmaceutical breakthrough transformed the disease from a death sentence into a manageable infection. But that was only half the story.