Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1996. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1996. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Reuters NewMedia, Inc. - Thursday, October 31, 1996
The AIDS Treatment Project and the European AIDS Treatment Group said they had compiled research showing up to a 50 percent reduction in hospitalisations and deaths among patients who got the drugs.
"When doctors and patients are able to use all the available drugs, you start to see some very dramatic results," said Raffi Babakhanian of the London-based AIDS Treatment Project, which has lobbied to make such drugs more widely available in Europe.
"These are people who would have been hospitalised or would have been dead and they're not."
The drugs include protease inhibitors, which have shown strong results when combined with other drugs in clinical trials. Babakhanian said they also included new drugs that targeted herpes infections such as cytomegalovirus, which can blind AIDS patients.
The two groups surveyed clinics in the United States and Europe and contacted European governments that keep abreast of AIDS treatment statistics.
"This is very rough data," Babakhanian admitted, saying it had not been submitted for the standard peer-review process that backs most scientific and medical studies.
"But we thought we should get this information out quickly. Everybody is seeing something dramatic. Everywhere we are looking is the same story."
U.S., Dutch and French doctors who have been studying and treating AIDS patients would be presenting and discussing the data, Babakhanian said.
The drugs are widely available in the United States, France, the Netherlands and Germany but many have not been approved in countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal.
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