Washington Blade - November 2, 2001

FDA approves AIDS drug for all patients

FOSTER CITY, Calif. (AP) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a new pill to treat HIV, the first such move this year. In addition to approving the pill Viread, taken once a day, the FDA last Friday also granted Foster City-based Gilead Sciences the ability to promote the drug for use by all AIDS patients. "This is exactly what we had hoped for," said AIDS activist Martin Delaney. "This is going to be an important drug for AIDS treatment at every stage of the disease." The FDA approved Viread for all patients, including those being treated for the first time. Delaney and others had feared the drug would be limited to those patients who had already developed a resistance to their drug treatments. Gilead will begin shipping Viread to pharmacies next week, said company spokesperson Amy Flood. A year's prescription will cost $4,135.

Syphilis cases rise among gay and bisexual men

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Syphilis is up sharply in San Francisco, with the vast majority of reported cases among gay and bisexual men who have unprotected sex with multiple partners, health officials report. As of September, 116 cases have been reported this year, compared with 71 cases in all of 2000, 47 in 1999 and 39 in 1998. Of the cases reported this year, 93 were among gay or bisexual men, up from 47 last year, 29 in 1999 and 10 in 1998. The study suggests the rise comes because gay and bisexual men are having unprotected sex with unfamiliar partners they meet in sex clubs, adult bookstores and on the Internet. The 93 infected gay men reported having 1,225 sexual partners and could identify only 8 percent of them by name. Similar syphilis spikes have been reported in San Diego, Florida, Boston and Chicago, said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner of the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

Increase in bacterial infection among S.F. gay men

SAN FRANCISCO -- A Centers for Disease Control study shows that shigella sonnei infections increased dramatically in 2000 among gay men in San Francisco, Reuters reported. The bacterium spreads easily through small amounts of fecal contamination and causes bloody diarrhea and stomach upset; it is easily treated with antibiotics. The CDC study shows that the number of infections reported in San Francisco increased more than tenfold from June to December 2000 compared to previous years. The study reports that the outbreak took place mainly among gay men and was probably spread through oral sex and mouth-to-anus contact. "Following efforts to heighten awareness, the number of cases has declined, but new cases continue to occur at low levels in this risk group," Reuters reported CDC researchers as saying.

Study: Breast cancer not hereditary in most women

LONDON -- Most women with a family history of breast cancer will never get the disease themselves, according to a new report that appears in the Oct. 27 issue of the Lancet, Reuters reported. The report confirms that women who have a sister, mother or daughter with breast cancer have an above-average risk of developing the disease, but most women who get breast cancer do not have a close relative with breast cancer. "Women with a family history of breast cancer are unlikely to develop breast cancer themselves and even less likely to die from it," the report's lead author, Dr. Valerie Beral of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund's Cancer Epidemiology Unit in Oxford, told Reuters. Beral's conclusions are based on an analysis of 52 studies that included 58,209 women with breast cancer and 101,986 cancer-free women. The analysis indicates that for women with a family history of breast cancer, their risk depends on the number of close relatives with the disease. The report also shows that women with a family history of breast cancer are not likely to develop breast cancer at a young age.

Thailand taps AIDS as top cause of death

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- AIDS is the leading cause of death in Thailand -- not heart attacks or accidents as previously thought, health officials said Friday. AIDS and related complications accounted for 16 percent of all deaths in 1998, said Dr. Chanpen Chuprapawan of the Health Ministry, after examining 20,000 deaths in six provinces. Accidents, high blood pressure and cancer were other main causes of death, she said. AIDS "might have been the No. 1 killer for years, but we had been unaware because of a wrong system of recording data," Chanpen said. Nearly 1 million people in Thailand, a Southeast Asian nation of 61.2 million, have been infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, since the beginning of the epidemic. Of those, 300,000 have died. Government statistics previously placed heart attacks as the main cause of death in Thailand, followed by accidents. According to statistics for 1996, the latest year for which figures are available, 79 out of 100,000 people died as the result of heart attacks and 64 were killed in accidents. -- From staff and wire reports

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