HIV rapidly growing resistant to drugs: [...] Investigators discovered that while only 3.4 percent of the 264 new cases they tested were resistant to 15 anti-HIV drugs from 1995 to 1998, the rate jumped to 12.2 percent of the 113 new infections in the years 1999 and 2000. At the same time, the rate of HIV infections resistant to more than one drug rose from 1.1 percent to 6.2 percent. The resistance to the drugs was most common among homosexual men.

Well, it's not as if any of this is even slightly surprising. Combine a highly adaptive virus with widely prescribed treatments, and add in a population that largely feels that once they've seroconverted, safe sex is someone else's problem, and you not only get resistant diseases, but multidrug resistance on top of it. We've seen it with tuberculosis, we've seen it with bacterial infections generally, and now we're seeing it with AIDS.

Granted, it's going to take a while before drug resistance reaches a level that renders the drugs largely useless. But not a long while, given that the rate seems to be increasing three percent per year. (That said ... it's an unusually small study, given that the numbers should be easily available. The CDC tracks new AIDS infections, and it shouldn't be that hard to get blind information from doctors on them; in fact, I should imagine that the CDC would require that type of reporting as part of the disease intelligence.)