Word: azt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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AIDING INFANTS Babies of HIV-positive mothers face a 30% chance of contracting the virus during delivery. With the inexpensive and commonly used antiviral drug nevirapine, however, only about 13% of newborns become infected. That's better than a short course of costly AZT and requires just one pill for the mother during labor and a few drops for the baby within three days of birth. It should be a boon to the Third World, where mother-infant transmissions keep AIDS rampant...
...Wednesday when a joint American-Ugandan research team announced a new, simple and inexpensive way to help prevent the transmission of the AIDS virus from pregnant mother to child. The new treatment uses the drug nevirapine, whose costs amounts to about $4, instead of the standard, short-course AZT regimen used in the Third World, whose costs total an impractical $268. Better yet, the new method proved more effective: It brought the risk of mother-to-child HIV transmission down to 13 percent, a big improvement over the 25 percent transmission risk of the standard Third World AZT method...
...treatment is probably not as effective as the even more complicated, more expensive, full-course AZT treatment used in the United States," says TIME medical columnist Christine Gorman. "But in the Third World, where costs and infrastructure make that kind of treatment impossible, this allows you to do something instead of nothing." And that something is not inconsequential: Researchers estimate that the new nevirapine regimen could prevent 300,000 to 400,000 newborns each year from being infected by HIV. In the developing world, where 1,800 babies are born each day with the AIDS virus, this is revolutionary medicine...
...forced the multinational companies to drop prices. Until last year, Flucanazole, an important antibiotic used to fight a fatal form of meningitis that accompanies AIDS, cost $7.36 a tablet. This year the Thais began manufacturing it locally, and the price dropped to $1. Glaxo Wellcome reduced the price of AZT to less than $1 per tablet after Thailand began making its own version...
Pharmaceutical companies insist the high prices are necessary to finance new-drug development. That's certainly true, at least initially. Yet many of the recent breakthroughs have been paid for by U.S. taxpayers. AZT was discovered by the National Cancer Institute and given to Burroughs Wellcome (now Glaxo Wellcome). DDI was developed at the National Institutes of Health and licensed to Bristol-Myers Squibb...