The answer to Johnson's survival is far from "magic." According to reports, he takes the same kinds of drugs that are available to other HIV patients in the developed world, and increasingly in impoverished nations in Africa and Asia, where the disease still runs rampant. Many people have lived with HIV even longer than Johnson.
"There is nothing unique about Magic," said Spencer Lieb, senior epidemiologist and HIV/AIDS research coordinator for the Florida Consortium for HIV/AIDS Research. "There are still people alive and kicking and doing very well 20 and 30 years after infection." [Does Circumcision Prevent HIV?]
Lieb said that in the state of Florida alone, hundreds of patients have hung on since becoming infected with HIV in the early 1980s, when the first confirmed AIDS cases turned up in the United States. But Johnson and these people are still in the minority: According to research and estimates by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1.2 million Americans have HIV, and 20 percent of them are undiagnosed. Approximately 50,000 people become infected each year, and more than 18,000 die annually.
Researchers have developed a number of powerful drugs to help people like Johnson avoid this fate. The key weapon has been a regimen of three or four antiretroviral drugs, collectively known as highly active antiretroviral therapy, or HAART.
According to a Newsweek story from last spring, one of Johnson's doctors who helped pioneer the treatment placed him on the then-experimental drug cocktail in 1994, about a year and a half before it came into widespread use in 1996. [Top 10 Stigmatized Health Disorders]
"Magic got a jumpstart on experimental drugs before they were released to the general public," Lieb told Life's Little Mysteries, "but there were many people in clinical trials benefitting at the same time."
How Has Magic Johnson Survived 20 Years with HIV?
By taking the right regimen every day, most HIV patients can see the number of virus particles in a sample of their blood, or viral load, become undetectably low.
Not only does a low viral count stave off symptoms of HIV and AIDS, but it also slashes the odds of a randomly mutated copy of the virus emerging that can prove resistant to the therapy. Furthermore, a low viral load severely reduces the risk of transmitting the virus to others.
Yet even without modern drugs, in rare instances an HIV-positive person can manage on their own to keep AIDS at bay. These "long-term nonprogressors" or "elite controllers," estimated at as few as one in 500, have lived for decades with HIV, despite not being on antiretroviral therapy.
