AEGiS-APPJ: Making Experimental Drugs Available for AIDS Treatment

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1987. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Making Experimental Drugs Available for AIDS Treatment

AIDS & Public Policy Journal 2, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 1987): 1-5.
Mathilde Krim

There is a pressing, desperate need and a demand for new therapies: new therapies for the opportunistic infections and malignancies that are the immediate cause of death in AIDS, and therapies for the underlying infection with the retrovirus recently renamed human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), that which destroys the ability of the immune systems to function effectively. It is not hard to understand why, under the present tragic circumstances, both patients and physicians have often resorted to unconventional treatments and to the use of non-FDA-approved drugs obtained in foreign countries. Nor is it hard to understand why reports circulating this past summer of one drug's favorable effects in a group of patients with AIDS--AZT--should have had the effect of a bombshell.
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