Hospital admissions for AIDS patients are down by 40 per cent because of the success of new drug treatments, according to an Irish doctor who treats the virus. Dr Fiona Mulcahy, genito-urinary physician at St James's Hospital, Dublin, said combination therapy, which stops the virus dividing in the cell and infecting other cells, is proving very successful.
She said the death rate from AIDS had also fallen very significantly in the State. Some 600 people who were HIV positive were treated at the hospital.
Speaking last night at a lecture given as part of the 25th anniversary celebrations at St James's Hospital, Dr Mulcahy showed a photograph of a wasted man in the last stages of AIDS which was the "typical" view of infected people.
"It would have been common to come into our clinic and see a lot of underweight people but now we are putting them on diets so that they do not put on too much."
She said one of the most striking aspects of the new treatment was the interest among drug addicts and prisoners in taking the combination therapy, despite the difficult regime which involved 16 tablets a day
Dr Mulcahy said prisoners who were HIV positive were now being allowed to participate in methadone maintenance programmes, rather than slow detoxification, so that they could become involved in the new treatment programme.
"In the past, these patients would have been reluctant about any sort of treatments and there were problems with compliance or other drugs being taken at the same time. Now the majority of drug-users want the new therapy even though they know that they must be relatively stable to do it."
Approximately 100 of Dr Mulcahy's patients who are drugusers are on the treatment. "The treatment costs from £10,000 to £16,000 a year, so they really need to be committed to it."
Ms Maeve Foreman, medical social worker at the genito-urinary clinic, said it was very important to encourage people who think they might be HIV positive to come forward for testing. She said there had been a small number of deaths of people who had come forward for treatment too late.
The new developments meant that there needed to be a new approach to the psycho-social treatment of people who were HIV positive. "There are people who spent several years gearing themselves up to dying and now they have to turn around and gear themselves up to staying alive. It is a huge adjustment."
She said she had dealt with patients who "spent life-savings, cashed in insurance policies, used credit cards to the limit and came out to their family as being gay on the basis that they only had a year left to live".