NEW YORK, Nov 19 (AFP) - The United Nations' Children's Fund (UNICEF) late Thursday hailed a study done in Zambia on a cheap, common antibiotic that greatly reduces the death rate among children with the AIDS virus as "a major breakthrough."
The research findings of Britain's Department for International Development (DFID) "represent a major breakthrough ... and has the potential to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of children each year," UNICEF said in a staement.
In the research, to be published in next Saturday's issue of The Lancet, Co-trimoxazole, a combination of two drugs that is one of the cheapest antibiotics in the world, was used in a test that involved 534 Zambian children aged under 15 who had the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Half of the children were given the drug each day in the form of an oral dose; the other half were given a harmless lookalike called a placebo.
When researchers did a followup 19 months later, they found that 74 (28 percent) of the children in the co-trimoxazole group had died, while 112 (42 percent) had died in the placebo group.
The findings were so remarkable that the study was discontinued on ethical grounds. The placebo group were immediately put on co-trimoxazole.
The clinical reason for the success is unclear, but it is thought the drug combats pneumonia and tuberculosis bacteria that commonly claim the lives of people whose immune systems have been wrecked by HIV.
"UNICEF has been hopeful that co-trimoxazole could work to prolong childrens lives, and now that we have the hard evidence, the challenge is to reach as many children as we can, and immediately," UNICEF said in its statement.
"This cheap, widely available drug makes it possible to ensure that every child who needs it, can get it," it said.
"DFID and the MRC (Britain's Medical Research Council) are to be roundly congratulated in having undertaken the kind of groundbreaking research that is driven by the determination to save lives.
"The research findings make it incumbent on all partners in the fight against AIDS to do the same," UNICEF said.
About 38 million people around the world have HIV, according to figures released in July by the UN agency UNAIDS.
Of that total, around 25 million live in sub-Saharan Africa, the world's poorest region.
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