OUAGADOUGOU, Dec 11 (AFP) - Two new studies confirmed Tuesday the stunning effectiveness of anti-retroviral drugs in Africa, dealing a blow to critics who claim the continent is ill-equipped to administer these powerful treatments against the AIDS virus.
The research strongly backs the usefulness of the so-called "cocktail" of drugs that are common in rich countries but so far reach only a tiny number of people in Africa, which is bearing the brunt of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic.
One study was carried out in Senegal by a Franco-Senegalese team coordinated by Ibrahim N'Doye of the Senegalese National Committee for the Fight Against AIDS and Eric Delaporte of France's Institute for Research in Development (IRD).
They enrolled 58 people in a 22-month course of treatment between 1998-2000 involving a classic regime of three HIV-inhibiting drugs taken three times a day.
The patients had high rates of infection by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Eighty-five percent of them had already developed full-blown AIDS.
"The results were excellent," Delaporte told a press conference on the sidelines of a major conference on AIDS in Africa in Ouagadougou, capital of the west African state of Burkina Faso.
Virus levels plunged from 100,000 copies per millilitre of blood on average to fewer than 500, and the rate of CD4 white blood cells, which are a vital weapon in the body's immune system, rose on average from 100 per cubic millimetre to 179.
Few patients reported negative side effects. Only two cases showed resistance to the drugs. And a very high portion of patients -- 88 percent -- complied fully with the drug-taking regime throughout the trial.
"This has demonstrated the feasibility of access to treatment in an African context as well as the effectiveness and tolerance of these drugs," Delaporte said, adding that the next stage was to widen the project to include larger numbers of volunteers.
Anti-retroviral drugs have been propelled to the top of the agenda in the worldwide AIDS crisis.
The most effective weapon against HIV, they have been found to reduce levels of the virus to, in many cases, below detectable levels, greatly prolonging the lifespan of patients who otherwise would have died within a few years.
Africa, which has 28.1 million of the worldwide 40 million people with HIV, desperately needs these wonder drugs, but the treatment is so expensive that very few of its citizens -- just 30,000 -- have access to it.
Defenders of the pharmaceutical industry also say that Africa lacks the human resources of doctors and laboratory technicians, and the equipment to ensure that these vital drugs are used properly.
If the anti-retrovirals are dished out without proper supervision, that would enable HIV, a devious, fast-mutating virus, to be become resistant to them, just as hospital "superbugs" and pernicious strains of tuberculosis have become immune to powerful antibiotics.
But two other projects, carried out by the UN agency UNAIDS in Uganda and Ivory Coast, have backed the practicability of administering the cocktail in Africa, with close compliance by local care workers and patients and very few cases of resistance.
A French-Ivorian study, also announced here Tuesday, of 717 Ivory Coast volunteers who included 86 people from the UNAIDS initiative showed that of those who took the anti-retrovirals, 85 percent with a very low CD4 count of under 100 were still alive a year after the start of treatment.
Among those in a similar condition who did not take the drugs, 60 percent had died.
The remarkable results of such projects add powerfully to moves to expand use of retrovirals to worst-hit countries -- provided that money can be found to train a corps of personnel to ensure that the drugs are administered properly.
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