Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1999. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1999. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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Reuters NewMedia - Monday September 6, 1999
Up to 30 percent of women in sub-Saharan Africa are infected with the deadly virus that causes AIDS and a quarter of them will pass the virus to their babies.
Two studies published in The Lancet medical journal showed that a single dose of nevirapine to both the mother and infant was cheaper and more effective than the normal multi-dose treatment with zidovudine.
"This simple and inexpensive regimen could decrease mother-to-child HIV-1 transmission in less-developed countries," Professor J. Brooks Jackson, of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, said in a statement.
At $4 per dose for both mother and child, nevirapine costs about 10 percent of the cheapest longer-term treatments.
Jackson and his colleagues compared nevirapine, which is given to the mother when labor begins and to the baby within three days of birth, with zidovudine in 626 pregnant women in Uganda.
Zidovudine, Glaxo Wellcome's original HIV drug, must be given every three hours during labor and for the first seven days of the baby's life.
The researchers tested babies at birth and at 6-8 weeks and 14-16 weeks. Twenty-five percent of the zidovudine babies had the infection at 14-16 weeks, compared to 13.1 percent in the nevirapine group.
"The efficacy of nevirapine compared with zidovudine was 47 percent up to age 14-16 weeks," the researchers said.
In a separate study, scientists from the University of California calculated the costs of the two treatments for a hypothetical group of 200,000 women in sub-Saharan Africa which bears the heaviest burden of the disease.
"Single-dose nevirapine administered to mothers and neonates (newborns) in the intrapartum period (during labor) and soon after birth presents a deliverable and cost-effective regimen for prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV-1 in sub-Saharan Africa," said Dr Elliot Marseille and his colleagues. In 1997 up to 600,000 babies worldwide were infected with the virus through mother-to-child transmission, about 1,600 children daily. Most children are infected during birth.
Nevirapine is made by Roxane Laboratories, a Boehringer Ingelheim GMbH company, and sold under the brand name Viramune.
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