(ATN) Suramin Disaster: The Story Is Told

(ATN) Suramin Disaster: The Story Is Told

AIDS TREATMENT NEWS No. 060 - July 15, 1988
John S. James

An article in the July/August issue of San Francisco: The Magazine traces the history of the suramin drug trial in 1985-- the first multicenter test of an antiviral AIDS drug in the United States. This disastrous trial killed some of the participants and became a major setback for AIDS research, delaying the progress of clinical trials for perhaps as much as two years or more. It has provided the foundation for justifying the slow pace of trials, restrictions on access to experimental treatments, the movement to accept and romanticize death in the gay community, and the corresponding attitude in government, business, medicine, and the media to write off those already ill or infected, and not bother with the practical clinical research or other public policy commitments designed to save their lives.

Yet for the last several years word of mouth reports circulating among those in the AIDS community close to the suramin trials said that major mistakes in the conduct of the trials had contributed to a disaster that was at least in part avoidable. The current article in San Francisco, by San Francisco Sentinel reporter Charles Linebarger, brings some of this history into public view for the first time.

We learn, for example, that the National Institutes of Health didn't tell the investigators running the trial that adrenal damage was a possible side effect of suramin because "any doctor can make a clinical diagnosis of adrenal insufficiency". But the symptoms of that condition can mimic AIDS symptoms, so they were not recognized until too late. If the physicians running the trials had been warned, they would have included a simple test for adrenal damage.

The San Francisco article may help to shake the fatalism which resulted in part from the Suramin trials--a fatalism which has allowed U.S. public policy to accept projections of hundreds of thousands of AIDS deaths with remarkably little effort to avert them.

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