Word: azt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Doctors in the U.S. have known since 1994 that the drug AZT can substantially reduce the chance of transmission of the AIDS virus from an infected woman to her newborn child. Unfortunately, administering AZT to pregnant women is complicated and quite expensive--about $1,000 per mother. That's far beyond the means of most developing countries, where 1,000 newborns are infected each...
...faster than research can introduce them to the market involves several studies in developing countries funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These large clinical trials involve 12,211 women in seven countries and test the effectiveness of several treatments of AZT in preventing transmission of HIV from a pregnant mother to her fetus...
While Angell's moral outrage is not unique, her reasoning is. Angell loses sight of the issue and compares these AZT trials to the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis, when poor African-American men were told that they were receiving penicillin treatment, a known cure, but were in reality given a placebo. In the studies of today, there is no such cover-up. The women in the study know they may be receiving placebo or AZT-and they had a voice in designing the experiments and worked with international health officials...
...offering dideoxynosine as a treatment after it had been used in less than 100 patients and allowed it to be combined with other drugs, even though that increased the concerns about toxicity in these drugs. After use as a treatment, it was pulled because it was less effective than AZT and also did not work as a combined therapy. This information could have been known before widespread distribution as a therapy; in the meantime, patients could have used previously released treatments or waited, which may have been better than ingesting large amounts of toxic products...
After all the hoopla over these trials, it may be that AZT is not the cure-all Angell suggests. Recent studies show that even though HIV may be decreased in the blood, where it is measured as an indication of efficacy of treatment, it may still be harbored in higher concentrations in lymph nodes, where it is equally if not more dangerous to the body's immune system. Already, drug-resistant strains have appeared. A recent study from the National Cancer Institute even shows that AZT causes cancer in the offspring of pregnant mice treated with AZT...