Letter: HIV medication for inmates helps us all

Monday, April 3, 2006 | 7:59 a.m.

Regarding the Sun's March 30 story, "Inmates not always getting HIV medication":

Why should anyone care if inmates don't get HIV medications? Because it costs society big bucks if they don't get the medications. In many cases, if a person with HIV doesn't take their medications, the HIV virus can mutate and become immune to the drugs the patient was taking.

We already have very few drugs we can use against HIV, so limiting it even more by making the virus immune is crazy.

The newer drugs are far more expensive and society has to pay for them. Should the inmate have sex with anyone, they can transmit the new mutated immune virus to others, even other people with HIV who may have been using the same drug as treatment.

We already have some people with the super virus for which there is no drug treatment. The results? People with HIV who will be spending a lot more time, at your expense, in the hospitals taking very expensive treatment instead of cost-effective drug therapy.

Be angry the jails don't give the appropriate drug therapy, because it costs everyone a lot more money if they don't. Yes, and because it is the right thing to do.

Prevention of much higher costs is the best investment we can make. Be very angry the jails are not doing everything they can do to save money. Jails already cost us far too much.

You don't have to be a person living with HIV/AIDS to care.

Gary Vrooman, Las Vegas