HIV Medication Side Effects

The most serious side effects with HIV medications is very rare, and that is lactic acidosis. I have only seen a couple of cases in my life, so it really is very rare. Lactic acidosis means that the body becomes very acidic. The patients get short of breath. The body is very intolerant of high acid levels, and that can lead to death quite quickly. But, thankfully, it's very rare. We do see it overseas a bit, in resource limited settings, where the drugs that we use mostly are indeed AZD 14 DDI, where other drugs are not available in most countries. Other serious side effects, thankfully, are rare. But, if kidney function or liver function is affected, that's bad. Very rarely, with viralkin, the liver can seriously be damaged, very rapidly. If the drug, however, is used only when C4 counts are very low, we've found that doesn't occur hardly at all. But, we do have to warn patients, if they feel sick when they go on those drugs they should let us know quickly. Tenofovir can cause renal damage, but it's very rare. In the clinical trials, they didn't even see it, but we do see it sometimes, but it's slowly developing and reverseable, we just have to watch for it. Sometimes skin rashes can be very severe. Again, it's very rare, but with the virakin and some of the other drugs, a very serious skin rash can occur which can sometimes be fatal. So there are some serious side effects, they don't occur very often, but they do exist.