Ronald Transcript

Certainly, since the advent of protease inhibitors and the real progress in antiretroviral medication, the ability to treat HIV infection and slow down the progression to serious illness and death is very real. However, the disparity in being able to reap the benefits to the treatment advances is also very real in the United States, and certainly when one looks at the global epidemic. Health care is still very much a privilege and not a right, so a person’s socio-economic status affects the degree to which he or she has access to the medications. There are racial disparities in health care which make the ability to take advantage of the medications an issue of race. So, the disparities that we have in our society continue to play out in the AIDS epidemic. [...]