Word: arv
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Alisha Saleem, 20, was born too early to benefit from the newest antiretroviral (ARV) drugs. In fact, there weren't any HIV treatments for adults, much less children, in 1986. Saleem, who contracted the virus from her mother, an intravenous-drug user, was 4 when she took her first AIDS drug, and even then the only option she had was AZT. Today doctors know that the best way to fight the virus is to hit it with three drugs at once, one of which is preferably a protease inhibitor. But early patients like Saleem had to learn the hard...
...UNAIDS last week, 530,000 children under the age of 15 contracted HIV in the past year, most from their HIV-positive mothers who pass along the virus during birth. With their first breath, these children are born fighting for their lives. And while ever more life-saving antiretroviral (ARV) drugs are moving into places like Africa, thanks to the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Global Fund, there just aren't enough doctors in these regions familiar with treating kids to use these drugs properly...
...haven't done our jobs." Nobody knows better than these doctors themselves that they are only a band-aid, a temporary solution to the more insidious problem of the weak health care system in Africa. The U.S. doctors are charged with treating children urgently in need of ARV care, while at the same time training and teaching local doctors and nurses how to adjust doses and understand symptoms of AIDS in the disease's youngest patients. It hasn't been easy, but the 52 doctors who left Houston in August have been doing their small part to treat as many...
...nations at the most advanced stages of testing in women. Dr. Gita Ramjee, of the HIV Prevention Research Unit in Durban, South Africa, has worked with all five, and is hopeful that they will prove effective and make an impact on the disease. Because these latest microbicides are reformulated ARVs, however, the problem of the virus becoming resistant to them is a potential drawback. Dr. Peter Piot, of UNAIDS, suggests basing microbicides only on the drugs that do not make it through the pharmaceutical pipeline - many are rejected because they don't maintain high enough levels in the blood...
...Even more tantalizing than the microbicides is the idea of taking a pill before intercourse or other high-risk behavior, and thereby becoming protected from HIV. Drugs for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) were born from the success of programs that prevent mother-to- child transmission; since ARVs given to women pre- and post- delivery are effective in reducing the transmission of HIV to the child, some experts believe that using ARVs before exposure to HIV may have the same effect in protecting partners. Five trials, all involving two compounds, Tenofovir or Truvada, are now underway in Thailand, Botswana, Peru, West...