Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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United Press International; Wednesday July 1 11:06 PM EDT
Michael Smith, UPI Science News
The good news for patients is that combination drug therapies work well to control the virus, said Dr. Julio Montaner of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
But the drug regimes, which can require patients to take as many as 20 pills a day in a complicated schedule, are difficult to follow, Montaner said, and "the bad news is that adherence has to be perfect" or the virus will rebound.
"We're not dealing with jelly beans," he said. "We're dealing with real medications that are sometimes difficult to take."
Even a few mistakes can allow the virus to develop resistance to drugs, said Montaner, head of the Canadian HIV Clinical Trials Network and co-chairman of the last AIDS conference held in Vancouver.
Montaner noted that many drug companies are testing simpler drug regimes. "I hope that next year once-daily dosing will be a reality," he said. "Many individuals with HIV...will only access therapy if therapy is truly simplified."
There are hopes, reported earlier in the conference, that researchers will find ways to eliminate the virus entirely, "but as physicians today, this is not a reality we can bring to our patients," Montaner said. "Eradication is unlikely to occur in the short term."
Montaner was summarizing the state of modern anti-retroviral therapy in a plenary session to open the third day of the conference, which has attracted more than 13,000 researchers, physicians and AIDS activists to Geneva. The human immunodeficiency virus is a retrovirus, so that anti HIV- drugs are called anti-retrovirals.
Despite the hype of drug companies, he said, the bottom line of a series of studies comparing various triple-drug combinations is that "there is no large difference" in their effectiveness.
"We have truly expanded our therapeutic options," he said. "The options are growing very rapidly."
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