PARIS, Nov 7, 2007 (AFP) - A new drug therapy could help ease a terrible dilemma that has forced HIV-positive mothers to gamble with the well-being of their unborn children, as well as their own, a new study reported Wednesday.
Up to now, pregnant women infected with HIV or AIDS and their doctors faced a terrible choice.
A single dose of the drug niverapine during labor reduced the chances of the infant inheriting the deadly disease by 40 percent.
But if the newborn still became infected despite the drug, the child was far more likely to acquire a strain of the virus that was resistant to the medications most commonly used to treat HIV, raising the question of whether it was worth the risk.
There was an increased chance that the same resistant virus would develop in the already infected mothers as well.
A partial solution to this cruel choice now seems to be at hand, according to the study, published in the British journal The Lancet.
In a clinical trial, 199 of 397 HIV-infected pregnant women who sought care at two public sector health facilities in Lusaka, Zambia, were given single doses of two other drugs -- tenofovir and emtricitabine -- along with the niverapine during birth.
All three drugs are known as non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor drugs, or NNRTIs.
The second group of 198 soon-to-mothers were given only the niverapine, as has been standard practice.
Both groups also took a short course of a fourth drug, zidovudine, better known as AZT.
The researchers, led by Benjamin Chi of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia and University of Birmingham in Alabama, found that women given the four-drug combo were 53 percent less likely to develop higher
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