In the early days of the epidemic, the answer would have been simple -- and hard to take. After becoming infected with HIV, people could expect to get AIDS within about 10 years, and then live only 1 to 2 years more.
But things have changed since then. We have good HIV treatments, and people who take them as prescribed tend to do very well. We have better blood tests to help decide who should start treatment, to monitor how well treatment is working against the virus, and to help choose a new treatment if an old one stops working. With proper medical care, people with HIV can expect to live much longer now than they could 15 years ago.
We still can't tell exactly how long because the medications and tests have been around only for 10 years or less, and people are living longer than that. But, more and more, people with HIV are dying of other things, such as injuries and heart attacks, not AIDS.
This doesn't mean you don't have to protect yourself or your partner from HIV infection. As the years go by, HIV treatments may lose their effectiveness or have long-term side effects. Or the infection itself may have long-term effects that we don't know about yet. Also, some people can't take HIV medications because of side effects or other health problems, and untreated HIV infection remains a deadly disease.
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