Background: The use of utility values in cost-effectiveness analysis is an accepted method for defining outcomes. Increasingly, cost-effectiveness analyses examine outcomes that involve two or more health states. There is no accepted method of mathematically combining single health state utility...

Dramatic progress has recently been made in defining the pathogenesis and treatment of HIV infection. For the first time in the history of the AIDS epidemic, clinicians have at their disposal an understanding of the replication kinetics of HIV, reliable assays to measure viral load, an...