While I'm not going to express satisfaction over this - I watched a close friend of my ex-wife die of untreated AIDS in the early 80's, and I wouldn't wish it on Osama Bin Laden - it's hard not to see this as a result of hubris.
First the gay community blamed the disease on Ronald Reagan, homophobia, everything but their own behavior. Then they politicized the health funding system to direct a large fraction of US research resources to the disease, all the time whining we weren't doing enough. Then, finally, when the research community came up with several new families of anti-virals, got them tested and approved in record time, and the rest of us, largely uncomplainingly, paid through our insurance for these drugs to be doled out to AIDS patients, they took them as a license to go back to the massively promiscuous, unsafe sexual practices that were the real cause of the epidemic in the first place.
As with any drug, resistant strains are going to emerge, but what better way to ensure they emerge quickly than by intermittent treatment combined with behavior designed to spread the pathogen?
Since this time around it's unlikely anyone is going to catch the plague without real effort on his or her part - the blood supply is now safe - I'm afraid the predominant reaction to this second 'plague' will be that it should run its course.
I wonder what the excuse of the left wing is going to be this time for the 'second wave' epidemic..
Probably blaming the health care system for not providing free AIDS drugs for IV users!
I commend you for an intellegent response. You are correct. When AIDS infected individuals began receiving the "cocktail" drugs, most were able to return to a more active lifestyle, thus they began having unprocted sex.
Not only that but even for those who were only having sex with other men with AIDS were helping the disease mutate.
Let me give an elementary example of how I understand it.
Example, if "Fred" were on drugs A, B and C and Jack was on drugs B, D and E and they passed the virus to each other, Fred's virus would now be resistant to medicine B and Jack's virus would be resistant to medicine B. Now the cocktail of the two different combinations will work on neither of them and when Jack goes on to have sex with Joe who is on medicine E....well you get the picture.
This is not a "new" virus, just mutated and becoming resistant after almost a decade of the newer drugs, giving them time to become resistant and for the virus to mutate and spread.