Health: how advances in medicine have improved the daily lives of HIV-positive people

With his 81 meter, his 76 kilos and five sports sessions per week, Yassin Chekkouh, sports coach, is a man in great shape. Eight years ago, he discovered his HIV status. “I have always seen it as a death sentence. I thought I was gonna lose weight, I was gonna lose my hair”, says the young thirty-year-old. If he is well today, it is thanks to an effective treatment, triple therapy, which the doctors quickly prescribed to him. With one tablet a day, the virus is no longer detectable in his body, therefore no longer transmissible.

Discrimination still present

Today, Yassine Chekkouh no longer takes tablets, but an injectable treatment with an injection every 15 days, far from the first patients treated. “A young person who discovers HIV positive in 2023 and who will start treatment early has overall the same survival as an HIV negative person”, explains Professor Gilles Pialoux, head of the infectious and tropical diseases department at the Tenon hospital in Paris.

Treatments are changing, but discrimination persists, particularly via social networks. Even in the medical community, at the dentist, Yassin Chekkouh experienced this difference in treatment. His other fight is to fight against misconceptions around this disease.