Now HIV infection does not necessarily spell AIDS or early death. Though the death rate in those infected is still higher than that in the normal people, the gap between the death rates has seen a dramatic decrease in case of people who start medical care very soon after HIV infection and who get state-of-the-art HIV treatment.

The statistics have been obtained from a study of 16,534 Western Europeans with known dates of HIV infection ranging from 1981 to 2006. Researchers Kholoud Porter, PhD, and colleagues compared the life expectancy of these people with HIV infection to age- and sex-matched individuals without HIV infection.

Before 1996, when highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) became available, the statistics were dismal.

“When we just looked at pre-1996, before the HAART era, we would have expected to see 56 deaths, and actually we saw over 1,300 deaths,” Porter tells WebMD. “That gap narrowed and narrowed over time, so in 2004-2006 we observed 127 deaths where we would have expected 37 deaths. It is quite a dramatic decline, but still there are excess deaths.”

“We know that over time, people with HIV aren't getting AIDS as much, because they are getting treatment before they get down to those dangerous levels of immune suppression,” Porter says. “But we are still getting deaths. There are non-AIDS-defining causes of death that may be related to immune suppression. People are still dying of HIV disease itself; it is just not defined as AIDS.”

According to Dr. Michael Horberg, director of HIV/AIDS at Kaiser Permanente Health Plan in Santa Clara, Calif., HIV is now a complex chronic disease which, if aggressively treated, would cause mortality similar to the general population in that same Demographic.