Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1997. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1997. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Reuters NewMedia, Inc.; Friday December 5 8:41 AM EST
Matthew Bunce
Trials in Thailand, Ivory Coast and elsewhere that use a short treatment of the drug AZT aim to stop women passing on the HIV virus that causes AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) to babies during the final stages of pregnancy.
AZT is an anti-retroviral drug designed by Glaxo Wellcome to prevent the onset of AIDS in people with HIV.
"The Thailand trials will be completed in early January. The results will be out a couple of months later after follow-up work," said Stefan Wiktor, who leads AIDS research in Ivory Coast for the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
"By January, we should have a result on whether the regimens tried work and whether they are cost effective," Daniel Tarantola, Director of Harvard University's School of Public Health, told Reuters this week ahead of Africa's largest AIDS conference which starts in Ivory Coast Sunday.
The Ivory Coast study shows 25 percent of children in trials are born with HIV. Another 12 percent get it within three months of birth through breast-feeding -- which is particularly common in Arica compared with Asia.
Researchers hope the trials will cut drug costs and make drugs more accessible to people in poor countries.
"That not only means in money terms but whether health services can sustain efforts," said Tarantola.
UNAIDS figures show HIV rates in sub-Saharan Africa have ben grossly underestimated. The region now has an estimated two-thirds of the world's 30.6 million cases.
Some opponents say the trials, using placebo groups in tests of shorter than usual doses of AZT, withhold potentially lifesaving therapy from some patients.
CDC's Ivory Coast trials would most likely be stopped if an earlier result elsewhere showed that short doses of AZT worked.
"If they are successful we would stop the placebo tests as the justification for doing them was only to know if the short regimen worked," said Wiktor.
But he said that the Asian trials differed from African tests as they would not show results for breast-feeding, which is less common in Asia.
Trials results would be reviewed in January at the United States' Institute of Health in Washington, said Wiktor.
"Those trials are raising hopes that something can be done to stop the spread of AIDS to newborns," says Tarantola.
"There have been concerns, many of which were motivated by a lack of understanding of what was at stake," he told Reuters on Thursday.
Tarantola is due to present Friday the latest findings of the Monitoring the AIDS Pandemic Network (MAP) which tracks AIDS trends around the world.
The latest MAP meeting was held in Ivory Coast's commercial capital Abidjan this week.
He is calling for female condoms to be made more widely available as HIV infection rates are climbing faster for women than for men.
"There has been a tremendous response in Uganda...Uganda has just ordered several million," said Tarantola, pointing to a program which began there last month.
Africa's top AIDS conference, the 1Oth International Conference on Sexually Transmitted Disease and AIDS in Africa, which ends on December 11, takes as its theme AIDS and Development.
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