Why do people take multiple drugs for AIDS?

Just wondering. I read the wiki article on AIDS but it didn't say why so many were needed.

to stop the affects of the aids temporarilly

Because no one drug is good enough bacause AIDS attacks multiple systems in the body.

HIV patients are suseptible to a variety of illnesses.

For example, a drug known as "septra" is used to protect HIV patients from a specific form of pneumonia that can be deadly for the patient.

There are also other types of medications that function differently. The most dangerous situation is when people don't take medications properly and produce resistant strains of the virus.

Different medications attempt to disrupt the process of the virus. Medications are designed for specific purpose -- from preventing the virus attaching, to interrupting the reproductive process.

People need to take a combination of anti-HIV drugs, usually three rather than just one, because the HIV virus can mutate and develop resistance to a single drug fairly easily.

In the days when there was only one anti-HIV drug, AZT, it would generally only work for six to twelve months or so before resistance developed. It's much harder for a pathogen to evolve resistance if it is being attacked by several different drugs that work in different ways.

As well, the use of three drugs is more potent than the use of one in keeping virus numbers to a minimum, even if no resistance has developed.

Hi there.
There are a couple of reasons why the combination of treatment for HIV involves 3 different drugs.

The biggest reason and most important reason is to attack the HIV at different levels of its development. To better understand the mechanism in which they work you have to first understand how the virus develops in the body.
(This link will give you a detailed progression of HIV from attachment to assembly and budding. http://www.cellsalive.com/hiv5.htm )

The processes are.
1. Attachment.
2. Reverse transcription.
3. Intergration
4. Translation
5. Protease assembly.


All of the drugs attack the virus on the basis of these stages.
An example is the Fusion Inhibitors which attack the virus before it enters the cell. Or Reverse transcriptase inhibitors which inhibit the production of the reverse transcriptase enzyme. Or the Protease inhibitors which inhibit the production of the protease protein.

The basis of giving the 3 drugs is to attack the virus at the different sstages of its production to fully maximize the effects of the treatment.


The other reason is because the virus can easily mutate and easily develops resistance to one songle drug. SO the 3 drugs are to help reduce the chances of the virus becoming resistant.