Medicine: Has anyone noticed the 800-pound gorilla called AIDS hasn’t been in the room for years? It’s disappeared from the political radar because Big Bad Pharma tamed it.

A new peer-reviewed medical report describes in detail how the pharmaceutical industry turned HIV-AIDS from a death sentence into a chronic but manageable disease.

The New York-based American Council on Science and Health this week published “Whatever Happened to AIDS?” and its findings should shame the many politicians — even some claiming to be pro-business — for whom Big Pharma is a convenient villain.

Report author Dr. Josh Bloom, a medicinal chemist who is ACSH’s director of public health, writes that pharmaceutical firms’ combining of drug design, virology and biotechnology “delivered a revolutionary series of novel therapies in an exceptionally short period of time” that “is arguably among the most impressive in medical history in its scope, scientific sophistication and outcome, yet is largely taken for granted — when it is noted at all.”

As late as 1994, AIDS remained a certain death sentence. Bloom describes how it was not government or academics that discovered the principal drugs to treat and prevent AIDS. It was the pharmaceutical industry that fought the battle, discovering the seven steps in which HIV attacks human cells and how those complex mechanisms made HIV so hard to attack via vaccines.

In the last presidential campaign, John McCain complained about “the power of the pharmaceutical companies” and accused them of overcharging patients by millions of dollars, then “covering up” their abuses.

It’s time Democrats and Republicans alike started appreciating these curers and neutralizers of so many diseases, and the financial risks these firms take for the betterment of humanity.

As Steve Forbes points out in “How Capitalism Will Save Us,” bringing a single drug to market costs a major pharmaceutical company anywhere from $800 million to $1.5 billion, and the industry’s profit margin is about 18% — “especially reasonable considering only about one in 100 drugs ends up on the market.” Yet part of ObamaCare imposes an annual fee of $27 billion on manufacturers and importers of branded drugs.

Like the oil industry — another underappreciated sector — drug firms don’t luxuriate in their profits. They use huge amounts of their wealth — often on wild goose chases — to discover what works. Politicians and AIDS sufferers alike have reason to be grateful.