RENT, does Mimi have full AIDS?

I'm no medical expert, but HIV drugs are a lot better in modern times than the late 80s/early 90s. Like Angel, it makes sense that her illness could progress quickly.

Also keep in mind that Mimi is using drugs and otherwise abusing her health, which I'm sure didn't help things.

Yeah definitely. Luckily, medicine has advanced in that field, so those ten years are for the people who don´t take any kind of medicine

Sounds pretty strange to me since a person usually takes up to ten years to have full AIDS (if they don´t take medicines)

That's incredibly inaccurate. Doctors have stated when the disease was found and they were figuring out ways to cure it that it could take as little as six months to die. If you are referring to anything past 1996, if people blew off their medications then it would be the same thing. Every immune system is different. The character of Mimi was irresponsible, did not eat, and abused heroin. She would have been dead pretty quickly.

But, it's a musical so.....yeah.

At the time of the musical, AZT was brand new

AZT was approved in America in 1987. The musical takes place in 1994. So, no, it was not.

There are different strains of HIV, some of which progress faster to AIDS.

She may not have had AIDS but "hello disease" could have referred to the inevitability of her getting it at that time. Many developed resistance to AZT and transitioned into having AIDS. Likewise, its side effects were very harsh and coupled with her taking drugs, her immune system was under heavy attack.

You don't die from Aids, you die from whatever disease you have contracted because your immune system is so low.

EllieRose2 said: "At the time of the musical, AZT was brand new

AZT was approved in America in 1987. The musical takes place in 1994. So, no, it was not."

AZT was approved in America in 1987, but it wasn't immediately available for everyone who needed it. Also it cost $10K a year until the 1990s. It's not improbable that someone like Mimi wouldn't have had access to it until recently.

I do think we have to distinguish between AIDS progression after diagnosis and after initial infection. At what age could Mimi have been infected that would make progressive to AIDS realistic at age 19 while also taking AZT? Perhaps due to a wide variety of individual differences, it doesn't really matter and it could be realistic. But my understanding is that, while yes you may die months or weeks after HIV diagnosis, it is probably unlikely (if not impossible) to die months or weeks after the initial HIV infection.

The medical diagnosis of AIDS back then (and probably still now) was if your T cells fell under 200 and/or one came down with an opportunistic disease that was associated with AIDS. If your T cells were 50 then you had a diagnosis of AIDS. If they raised back up to say 350 you were now just HIV positive. I don't believe that once you have a diagnosis of AIDS and you can better through medication, etc, you always have that diagnosis. I may be wrong. I have a friend in Ft Lauderdale who had a 40 T cell count in 1989 and was diagnosed with AIDS. He currently has a T cell count of 1000 and his doctors, according to him, only classify him as living with HIV, not AIDS.

AEA AGMA SM said: "It's never stated that Mimi recovers.She breaks through from a near-death experience, lots of people do. Since that's the end of the show we don't see any follow up, and we don't get any sort of post-script epilogue. She could relapse the next day and be dead by New Year's for all we know."

Absolutely correct and in the context of the time setting, I don't think anyone would have had to ask if she was in some sort of remission. I was not being snarky when I said folks need to read the script (e.g., "<beep beep beep> AZT break" but it is also the case that some here simply and perhaps understandably don't understand that, at the time, both Roger and Mimi had a death sentence, irrespective of the HIV/ARC/AIDS labels.

I always thought "...hello, disease." referred to Mimi's heroin addiction.