Prevention: The Money-Saving Way of Fighting HIV Disease

We all know the cliché, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." There is no time and no disease where this old adage is more appropriate than in our current struggle against HIV/AIDS.

We all know that people with HIV/AIDS are living much longer than in the days before 1996. In 1996 the new combination medication therapy increased life expectancy on the average of four years. Today the average life expectancy after being infected is anticipated to be somewhat more than twenty-four years. We also know that people are having sex well into their 50s, 60s and older and getting infected. Today after treatment starts, the bare-bones average monthly cost of that treatment in the United States is a staggering $2,100.00 per person, if the infection is detected early on. That is a lifelong cost of $618,000.00 per person. If HIV infection is detected after the immune system collapses, the average monthly cost more than doubles to $4,700.00. Unfortunately, people who are infected and diagnosed after 50 tend to be in this latter group.

The estimated annual number of new infections in the U.S. is 40,000 people.  Of those an estimated 19% or 7,600 people are 50 or older. The estimated lifetime cost to treat all 40,000 people is an astounding $12,100,000,000.00 per year.

These cost estimates are low since they don't include the revenue lost to our society when HIV/AIDS transforms a vital fifty-year old wage-earning, tax-paying, self- sufficient member of our society into a ward of the state.

Prevention works. All we have to do is look at the billions saved by the prevention program instituted that has almost totally eliminated Mother To Child Transmission of HIV/AIDS.

Submitted by Edwin Krales, December 28, 2006