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Antiretroviral - The basics |
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 Antiretroviral drugs are medications for the treatment of infection by retroviruses, primarily HIV. When several such drugs, typically three or four, are taken in combination, the approach is known as highly active antiretroviral therapy, or HAART. The American National Institutes of Health and other organizations recommend offering antiretroviral treatment to all patients with AIDS. Because of the complexity of selecting and following a regimen, the severity of the side-effects and the importance of compliance to prevent viral resistance, however, such organizations emphasize the importance of involving patients in therapy choices, and recommend analyzing the risks and the potential benefits to patients without symptoms.
There are different classes of antiretroviral drugs that act at different stages of the HIV life-cycle.
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 What is a vaccine?
A vaccine is a medical product designed to stimulate your body's immune system in order to prevent or control an infection. An effective preventive vaccine trains your immune system to fight off a particular microorganism so that it can't establish a serious infection or make you sick.
What is the difference between a preventive HIV vaccine and a therapeutic HIV vaccine?
Therapeutic HIV vaccines are designed to control HIV infection in people who are already HIV positive (see Therapeutic HIV Vaccines Fact Sheet). Preventive HIV vaccines are designed to protect HIV negative people from becoming infected or getting sick. This fact sheet focuses on preventive HIV vaccines.
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 Infection with HIV-1 is associated with a progressive decrease of the CD4+ T cell count and an increase in viral load. The stage of infection can be determined by measuring the patient's CD4+ T cell count, and the level of HIV in the blood.
HIV infection has basically four stages: incubation period, acute infection, latency stage and AIDS. The initial incubation period upon infection is asymptomatic and usually lasts between two and four weeks. The second stage, acute infection, lasts an average of 28 days and can include symptoms such as fever, lymphadenopathy (swollen lymph nodes), pharyngitis (sore throat), rash, myalgia (muscle pain), malaise, and mouth and esophageal sores.
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 AIDS is the most severe acceleration of infection with HIV. HIV is a retrovirus that primarily infects vital organs of the human immune system such as CD4+ T cells (a subset of T cells), macrophages and dendritic cells. It directly and indirectly destroys CD4+ T cells.
Once HIV has killed so many CD4+ T cells that there are fewer than 200 of these cells per microliter (µL) of blood, cellular immunity is lost. Acute HIV infection progresses over time to clinical latent HIV infection and then to early symptomatic HIV infection and later to AIDS, which is identified either on the basis of the amount of CD4+ T cells remaining in the blood, and/or the presence of certain infections, as noted above.
In the absence of antiretroviral therapy, the median time of progression from HIV infection to AIDS is nine to ten years, and the median survival time after developing AIDS is only 9.2 months. However, the rate of clinical disease progression varies widely between individuals, from two weeks up to 20 years.
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