RELATED ITEMS On the Web The AIDS Clinical Trials Information Service has data on the latest HIV treatment. There are two different types of viral load testing. The National AIDS Treatment Information Project provides information about CD4 counts. The side effects of AZT may include headaches, trouble sleeping, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle soreness, rash, and discoloration of finger and toe nails. An HIV/AIDS primary care site from the University of Florida Health Science Center publishes fact sheets about saquinavir, ddI, ddC, AZT, 3TC and D4T. From The Post Recent HIV and AIDS articles from The Post are available online. From the AP Related articles from the Associated Press are available online. Editor's Note: Some of the above links will take you out of The Post's Web site. To return, use the Backbutton on your browser. Go to National Section Go to Home Page

Michael Mancilla (left) was at Jerry Roemer's side when he died of AIDS complications in August. They are pictured with their dog SIDA, which is Spanish for AIDS. By Nancy Andrews/TWP The Series Part 1: Hope and Disappointment Part 2: On the Front Line Part 3: Stopping the Virus Part 4: The Hunt for a Vaccine Part 5: Third World Despair Today's Articles As Epidemic Matures, Battle Shifts Treatment Holds Death at Bay

Treatment Holds Death at Bay

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 31, 1997; Page A01

Some miracles come in time, and some miracles teach people about time itself.

Karen Lyons can testify to the first kind of miracle. Two years ago, she was seriously ill with AIDS, barely able to get out of bed, ready for the funeral she had already planned. Today, the 36-year-old Philadelphia woman rides a bike. She has become a foster mother to a small child. She's making plans to go to graduate school in January.

Jerry Roemer is perhaps a testament to the second kind of miracle. A young Washington lawyer, he was even closer to death last year. Through courage and medicine, he traced a path partway back to health and work, to pleasures and responsibilities he had given up, before AIDS finally overtook him last month at the age of 32.

The source of both miracles is the new use of three antiviral drugs as therapy for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. It's a strategy of treatment that, for the first time, is allowing some people to think of HIV infection as a disease they may live with until they are old.

About 200,000 people — perhaps one-quarter of the people in the United States infected with HIV — are now on"triple therapy," as the various combinations of drugs are collectively termed. Most have started in just the last 12 months.

For some people this long-awaited therapeutic breakthrough has come too late to make much difference. Triple therapy has offered a fleeting — even a cruel — glimpse of health before returning them to AIDS's familiar downward course to death.

But for others with the advanced stage of HIV infection called AIDS, the new treatments have restored pasts that had been abandoned and helped birth futures that weren't thought to exist.

When Lyons tested positive for HIV in late 1989, she so thoroughly resigned herself to dying young that when she found herself alive two years later, she was quite surprised. So surprised, in fact, that she decided to quit drugs, quit alcohol and try to restore order to her life.