Introduction to Arvs - Botswana Teen Club

With ARVs, People With HIV Can Live
Long, Healthy Lives
The child on ARVs
can have a
normal, healthy
life
How should ARVs be taken?
� The patient must take three different ARV
drugs. The medicines do not work well if
you take only one or two.
� ARVs usually work in combination because
of the nature of the replication cycle of the
HIV.
� If the ARV that operates at a particular site
of the CD4 cell fail to stop some of the
virus, the other ARVs in the combination
will operate at the other sites to make the
virus inactive.
� Another way to
explain the
importance of taking
all three ARVs is to
compare the ARVs to
the three legs of a
cooking pot.
� If a pot is balancing
on three stones and
you take one away,
the pot will spill.
What do ARVS do?
� They keep the virus
from multiplying
� A good way to think
about how ARVs
work is that they
keep the virus
“sleeping”
How to educate caregivers and children on
taking all the three drugs!
Look at the soldier in the
picture.
He is wearing three things:
a hat, a shirt and pants
You can tell young patients
that ARVs are like the
soldier’s hat, shirt and
pants. If the soldier lost his
pants, it would be harder
for him to work!
How should ARVs be taken?
HAART refers to taking three effective
antiretroviral medicines together
The classes of ARV drugs are:
� Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase
Inhibitors (NRTIs),
� Non-Nucleoside Reverse
Transcriptase Inhibitors (NNRTIs)
� Protease Inhibitors (PIs).
� Fusion Inhibitors
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