[mortehu]

> people in the US who are HIV+ and under active treatment now live slightly longer lives than their HIV- counterparts

This sounded implausible, so I looked for a source. This page says "the average life expectancy of a 20-year-old person in the U.S. or Canada who began [anti-HIV therapy] shortly after he or she became HIV positive should be around 70", which is less than the life expectancy at birth of U.S. men:

http://www.catie.ca/en/treatmentupdate/treatmentupdate-200/a...

They do mention a plausible way for HIV-positive individuals to live longer, though: "compared to HIV-negative people, many HIV-positive people in Canada and similar countries are under a relatively high degree of medical scrutiny—they undergo visits to the clinic for interviews and laboratory tests several times each year. This degree of heightened medical surveillance is likely to detect any complications early on, before they can become serious"

[rm999]

I found this study that supports chimeracoder's claim: http://www.aidsmap.com/Life-expectancy-now-considerably-exce...

>A study from the US has found that some groups of people with HIV, especially those treated before their CD4 count falls below 350 cells/mm3, now have life expectancies equal to or even higher than the US general population ... the sole contributor to the increased mortality in people who started ART early was AIDS.

[Aelinsaar]

It's probably hard to underestimate just how significant that it though. How many medically founded causes of death can be traced to something that, if caught very early, would have been treatable? If every single little "blip" was a concern worth investigating, you'd undergo a lot of testing, but you'd rarely slip through the cracks.

Expensive and painful though.

[pkaye]

I think chronic kidney disease is one of them and I'm dealing with it. If they did urine test screening of the whole population every few years they could catch it in the early stages and try to keep it stable for much longer. Most of the medicines to do this are affordable generic medicines like ACE inhibitors and prednisone however once the kidney damage gets to a point where it is physically noticeable it is too late to treat or manage and costly dialysis and transplants are the only solution.

[Aelinsaar]

To be honest, that's more the norm for organ systems than not. The tests are mostly giant red flags, not subtle warning signs. Hopefully this is an area ripe for disruption with machine learning systems.

[derefr]

Wouldn't the HAART therapy used for HIV coincidentally treat at least a few other viral diseases than HIV, ones that would otherwise go untreated?