Life-Prolonging AIDS Cocktails Show Real Value
Reuters
February 25, 2005
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Drug cocktails that can prolong the lives of people infected with the AIDS virus are beginning to show their value but only about half of U.S. adults who should be receiving them are actually getting them, scientists reported on Friday.
The study was presented at a meeting in Boston of AIDS researchers at the 12th Annual Retrovirus Conference.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky and colleagues of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston estimated how many people had been helped by the combinations of HIV drugs called highly active antiretroviral therapy or HAART, which can suppress the virus.
Although they are not a cure, have toxic side effects and often stop working after a while, they have added 1.78 million years of life to people who had progressed to AIDS, Walensky told the conference.
"When you start adding the numbers and get big numbers, you realize how much progress there has been," Walensky said in a telephone interview.
"We intentionally did our best to make this conservative," she added. They covered the time between 1989 and 2002.
Adding in the estimated 2,800 babies who were saved from HIV infection by treating them and their mothers at delivery added another 186,000 years of life saved, she said.
Eyasu Teshale and colleagues at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 480,000 Americans aged 15 to 49 should be getting treated with HAART, but only 268,000 are.
Since learning that HAART cannot eliminate infection, doctors usually wait until the AIDS virus has seriously damaged a patient's immune system before starting therapy.
ONLY 55 PERCENT GETTING TREATED
"Using the largest set of national data available, we estimated that only 55 percent of eligible people living with HIV/AIDS age 15 to 49 years old are receiving antiretroviral therapy in the United States," they told the conference.
"Most of those persons who are not receiving treatment, it's because they have not been diagnosed," said the CDC's Dr. Ron Valdiserri. In another study Dr. Geraldine McQuillan and colleagues at the National Center for Health Statistics found that HIV infection is not becoming more common among adults aged 18 to 59 in the average U.S. household.
They compared two surveys, one taken between 1988 and 1994, and another taken between 1999 and 2002, which both included blood samples from groups considered representative of the U.S. population, excluding the military, homeless and prison inmates.
They found the earlier prevalence at 0.33 percent of the population and the 1999-2002 prevalence was 0.43 percent. "These numbers are statistically basically the same," McQuillan said in a telephone interview.
But numbers of blacks doubled, from just over 1 percent of those surveyed to just over 2 percent and McQuillan said it was mainly among the oldest group, those aged 40 to 49.
"Since we are not seeing increases in youngest age groups, you feel comforted that prevention messages are at least being heard," McQuillan said.
The CDC estimates that overall, 850,000 to 950,000 people in the United States are infected with HIV, including as many as 280,000 who do not know it.
In 2003, an estimated 18,000 Americans died of AIDS. Globally, 39 million people are infected and 3.1 million people died of AIDS last year, according to the United Nations.
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