Scientific Heresy...

"Joyce Ann Hafford was thirty-three years old and had always been healthy. She showed no signs of any of the clinical markers associated with AIDS -— her CD4 counts, which measure the lymphocytes that are used to indicate how strong a person's immune system is, and which HIV is believed to slowly corrode, were in the normal range, and she felt fine. In early June 2003, she was enrolled in the trial and on June 18 took her first doses of the drugs. "She felt very sick right away," recalls her older sister, Rubbie King. "Within seventy-two hours, she had a very bad rash, welts all over her face, hands, and arms. That was the first sign that there was a problem. I told her to call her doctor and she did, but they just told her to put hydrocortisone cream on it. I later learned that a rash is a very had sign, but they didn't seem alarmed at all."

Hafford was on the drug regimen for thirty-eight days. "Her health started to deteriorate from the moment she went on the drugs," says King. "She was always in pain, constantly throwing up, and finally she got to the point where all she could do was lie down." The sisters kept the news of Hafford's HIV test and of the trial itself from their mother, and Hafford herself attributed her sickness and nausea to being pregnant. She was a cheerful person, a noncomplainer, and was convinced that she was lucky to have gotten into this trial. "She said to me, `Nell' -that's what she called me-—`I have got to get through this. I can't let my baby get this virus.' I said, `Well, I understand that, but you're awful sick.' But she never expressed any fear because she thought this was going to keep her baby from being HIV positive. She didn't even know she was in trouble.""