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American Morning
Medical Advances Lead to Longer, Healthier Lives for AIDS Victims
Aired June 04, 2001 - 10:34 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Twenty years ago this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published its first report about what was to become known as AIDS and HIV. In the early days, a diagnosis of AIDS was a death sentence with no appeal, but as our medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta reports, medical advances have led to longer and healthier lives for people with AIDS.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Tony Braswell is living on borrowed time.
TONY BRASWELL, AIDS SURVIVOR: I had a good network of people who all said, given my health level, I should probably plan to die. I had four years to live, basically -- four to five years to live.
GUPTA: That was 1989 when Braswell was diagnosed with HIV. At that time, doctors didn't have much help from medicine or much hope for their patients. Braswell resorted to ancient rituals.
BRASWELL: It's kind of like walking on a sidewalk and if you don't hit the cracks, you know you're OK. But all kinds of superstition, all kinds of deals with God.
GUPTA: Facing death, Tony remembered all the things in life he still had to do, in fact he made a list.
BRASWELL: Visit every continent, which I haven't finished yet. Make more money -- one of them was make more money than my age, which, I've finally got that taken care of, and one of them was go to the softball world series, which I did. And then one was to be in a Broadway play and that one was just kind of fun and sure enough, I've gotten that one done too.
GUPTA: But the list grew longer and Tony did better. It wasn't just luck or superstition. It was the medications.
DR. JIM CURRAN, EMORY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE: The drugs available for treating AIDS right now are nothing short of miraculous.
GUPTA: But it was a slow process. Twenty years ago, no one knew what was coming. CURRAN: Even we didn't know that our warnings were really just very small whispers about the size of the problem that we were in the midst of.
GUPTA: Dr. Jim Curran led the Centers For Disease Control's first task force on what was later called AIDS.
CURRAN: Mortality came rather quickly and it was inevitable within a few months of the diagnosis of people.
GUPTA: The first promising drug, AZT in 1987. It took nearly 10 more years for the victories to come fast and furious. Hart therapy, also known as the AIDS cocktail, has improved and prolonged the lives of numerous patients with AIDS.
CURRAN: With that came a huge amount of hope. People who were previously on their deathbeds or who were dying or suffering terribly from AIDS, had a hope now, for not cure, but a recovery of their high quality life.
GUPTA: Tony only wishes they would have come sooner for his former partner, Peter.
BRASWELL: He was a wonderful man and the medicine got here a little bit too late for him.
GUPTA: And too late for many more.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
Today, the hope lies in a possible AIDS vaccine, and as many in the public health community say, in education and prevention. That's because it may take decades before it's possible to commemorate not the start of this disease, but the anniversary of its cure.
KAGAN: So Sanjay, there are these new drugs out there, but they're not perfect, and they do have side effects.
GUPTA: Absolutely. There are side effects, and that's an important point. Diarrhea and nausea are side effects that people think of oftentimes, but there are also long-term side effects, such as diabetes, elevated cholesterol, heart disease, and even stroke. These are things that people need to be aware of.
I think one of the most important points about these is that they're not a cure. They should not be perceived as a cure. What we're seeing sometimes is people actually taking this drug and feeling better, their viral loads are going way, way down, and they're finding that maybe they're becoming lax in their methods of preventative transmission, and we're actually seeing some epidemic-type rates increase because of these drugs. That may be one of the things to watch out for as well.
KAGAN: A topic for another day.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thank you so much. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
