Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1988. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
The Associated Press; THURSDAY November 24, 1988
The program, to be financed by the National Institutes of Health, is designed primarily to pull together in one place the various kinds of therapies being tried by individual physicians around the nation and also provide a vehicle for them to share notes.
"These new programs will broaden the base of our clinical investigtions by including primary-care physicians who are not affiliated with AIDS research efforts that are currently supported by NIAID," said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases, or NIAID.
Fauci, who is also the Institutes' coordinator for AIDS research, made the announcement this week at a conference of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, a private organization.
"We are pleased to create a way to draw on the enthusiasm and experience of community physicians and their patients, who wish to have greater involvement in the national research effort on AIDS," said Fauci.
"Through these programs, we also hope to include in clinical trials more HIV-infected black and Hispanic persons and intravenous drug users and more women at risk of HIV infection."
A major recommendation of the White House AIDS commission's final report last summer was that federal researchers work more closely with local health groups in evaluating AIDS treatments.
The panel also pointed out that HIV infection, the virus that causes AIDS, now is spreading most rapidly among intravenous drug users who share contaminated needles and called for spending $15 billion over the next decade to tackle the drug problem.
Fauci said the community programs will operate separately but be coordinated with his Institutes' treatment evaluation network already in place to keep tabs on more sophisticated research.
Dr. Lawrence Deyton, a founder of the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, a major community treatment and testing center, is the National Institutes of Health official designated to head the expanded community network.
"The focus of this program is the community practitioner working in the area where his or her patients are," said Deyton.
"It can help improve the quality of their health care and, at the same time, increase the knowledge gained through treatment research."
A background paper noted "the relative lack of proven medical interventions for HIV infection and the many men and women willing, in fact desperate, to participate in clinical trials has created an environment in which potential therapies are administed in the face of meager or even no evidence. "Enrolling in a research study offers each participant a personal measure of hope," the paper continued.
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