Word: anemia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Unfortunately, AZT is not a cure and has a number of serious drawbacks. It must be taken every four hours around the clock to be effective, and can cause severe bone-marrow damage and anemia in some patients. "It's not an answer, and it's very toxic," says Polk, of Johns Hopkins. "Probably half of our patients on AZT will require weekly or bimonthly blood transfusions...
...adult population, including up to 30% of the men, have been exposed to the AIDS virus. Now babies and young children are also being infected, some at birth via their mothers, who are AIDS carriers, and others through blood transfusions, which are frequently administered to children suffering from malarial anemia. In tiny Rwanda (pop. 6 million), researchers estimate that as many as 22% of AIDS victims are children...
...halting the test robbed researchers of the chance to judge, under controlled conditions, any long-range effects of AZT, which might be as dangerous as the untreated disease. In fact, some people taking AZT have developed anemia and suffered bone-marrow degeneration. "AZT may be a genie that we are letting out of the bottle," says Dr. Itzhak Brook, chairman of the FDA advisory committee and the only dissenter in the vote. Dr. Maxime Seligmann, a French immunologist who has experimented with AZT at the Hopital St.-Louis in Paris, agrees: "There simply isn't enough knowledge about the benefits...
...first candidates for this therapy would be people with life-threatening hereditary disorders that are caused by a single, known defective gene. Among the illnesses being considered for gene therapy: beta-thalassemia, a severe form of anemia, and three rare disorders caused in each case by a defect in a gene that orders the production of a single, vital protein...
...addition to its benefits, AZT can cause substantial side effects, such as severe headaches and anemia, which results from the supression of blood cell production in the bone marrow. The long-term effects of AZT are unknown...