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HIV & AIDS Treatment in Practice #5, 8 May 2003
A regular electronic newsletter for health care workers and community-based organisations on HIV treatment in resource-limited settings. It is supported by and produced in collaboration with St Stephen's AIDS Trust and the International HIV/AIDS Alliance.

Its publication is also supported by Positive Action of GlaxoSmithKline, Boehringer Ingelheim and the Access 4 Trust.
   Last updated: 18.06.04
IN THIS ISSUE
About HIV & AIDS Treatment in Practice
News links from www.aidsmap.com
Talking About Side Effects (main feature)


NEWS LINKS FROM WWW.AIDSMAP.COM
A selection of news stories which have appeared since 24 April 2003.

MSF highlights need for cheaper paediatric drugs in global ARV price survey
  • The fourth edition of a pricing guide to the availability of antiretrovirals, setting out the discounts available to treatment providers in developing countries, has been published by the international NGO Médecins sans Frontières, working in partnership with WHO, UNICEF and UNAIDS. The report highlights continuing gaps, which were also identified recently in NAM’s newsletter HIV & AIDS Treatment in Practice, in providing for children with HIV who need affordable paediatric formulations.


GSK cuts price of HIV drugs to poorest countries
  • Pharmaceutical giant, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), has announced that it is halving the price of some of the drugs in its anti-HIV portfolio for 63 nations, including all African nations.


One third of $15 billion US AIDS budget must be spent on abstinence education
  • Religious conservative elements in the Republican party have forced amendments to the United States Global HIV/AIDS bill that will require one-third of all prevention funds given to African countries to be used in promoting sexual abstinence. The bill was passed by the US House of Representatives on May 1, and will go to the Senate for consideration within the next month.

[NOTE: despite the headline, this condition only applies to HIV prevention funding, not to the whole budget.]

Chinese experts ask why AIDS patients resistant to SARS
  • Contradicting the pronouncements of HIV co-discoverer Luc Montagnier, Chinese AIDS experts have told a US journalist that they believe people with AIDS receiving treatment in Chinese hospitals are less vulnerable than the rest of the population to SARS.


HIV-positive boys and girls enter puberty later
  • Immunosuppressed, HIV-positive children who were infected with the virus at birth enter puberty later than HIV-negative children, according to US research published in the May 1st edition of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.


Low albumin levels predict death in HIV-positive women, even if taking HAART
  • Monitoring serum albumin levels in HIV-positive women over time and prior to the initiation of HAART can predict disease progression and death, independent of traditional markers of HIV disease progression such as CD4 cell count and HIV viral load, according to a US study published in the May 1st edition of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.


Switch from d4T to abacavir gives `modest` fat gains
  • Two randomised studies reported in the May 1st edition of the Journal 0f Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes show that modest improvements in limb fat occur within 48 weeks of switching from d4T (stavudine) to abacavir. However, the rate of fat restoration is slow, leading Australian researchers to imply that studies of the switch strategy carried out to date are too short to judge the long-term success of the strategy, and that patients should not expect to see substantial improvement within the first year of switching.


Low creatinine clearance reported greater risk for lactic acidosis than any HIV drug
  • A French case control study of patients diagnosed with lactic acidosis whilst receiving nucleoside analogue therapy has revealed that low creatinine clearance and a CD4 cell count below 250 cells/mm3 prior to commencing therapy were the only significant risk factors for the condition. The findings are published in the May 15 edition of Clinical Infectious Diseases.


Avoid Zerit, Trizivir in first-line treatment, new UK guidelines recommend
  • 2003 BHIVA draft treatment guidelines will advise against the use of d4T and of Trizivir in first-line therapy, Dr Duncan Churchill told the Ninth Annual Conference of the British HIV Association on Saturday in a preview of new British treatment guidelines.

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Efavirenz more durable than nevirapine, but CNS toxicity underestimated
  • The ongoing debate about the relative merits of the non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors efavirenz and nevirapine is likely to be further inflamed by analyses from two of the UK’s largest clinic cohorts, one showing that efavirenz is significantly more durable than nevirapine, the other that long-term efavirenz CNS toxicity is higher than previously detected. The findings were presented at last week’s Ninth Annual Conference of the British HIV Association in Manchester.


Switch to Trizivir after 6 months induction just as effective as multi-class therapy
  • A switch from protease inhibitor-based therapy to Trizivir in people with no history of monotherapy or dual therapy with nucleoside analogues appears to be just as effective as continued therapy with an existing PI or NNRTI-containing regimen, according to the results of the Trizal study published in the April 2003 edition of HIV Medicine.


EuroVacc preparing for clinical trials of subtype C AIDS vaccine
  • A major European collaboration to design and test an AIDS vaccine is hoping to launch its first clinical trials this summer at Lausanne University Hospital, Switzerland, and at St Mary's Hospital, London, UK. However, a report issued by Reuters Health is misleading in suggesting these plans are more advanced, and larger in scale, than is in fact the case.





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