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Drugs May Offer AIDS Prevention

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the here's-hoping dept.

FlipFlopSnowMan writes "There is an interesting article on MSNBC about the possibility of preventing AIDS using the same pills that are currently used to fight the virus in affected individuals." From the article: "The drugs are tenofovir (Viread) and emtricitabine, or FTC (Emtriva), sold in combination as Truvada by Gilead Sciences Inc., a California company best known for inventing Tamiflu, a drug showing promise against bird flu. Unlike vaccines, which work through the immune system -- the very thing HIV destroys -- AIDS drugs simply keep the virus from reproducing. They already are used to prevent infection in health care workers accidentally exposed to HIV, and in babies whose pregnant mothers receive them."

4 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. Cash cow? by Tx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Q. How to make more money from expensive AIDS drugs?

    A. Obvious - sell it to people who don't have AIDS as well as people who do.

    As I understand, these drugs are very expensive, and personally I can't see any justification for using them prophylactically.

    --
    Oh no... it's the future.
  2. Re:Ah, man.. by dario_moreno · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "odds are 1 in 10000"...rather 1 in 1000, and even more for receptive sex, and if you do it once a day, you get almost a 1 in 2 chance of catching it after 500 days. Check Chad Douglas on google...always on top, positive after 5 years, dead after 15.

    --
    Google passes Turing test : see my journal
  3. Ummm... by spaztik · · Score: 4, Insightful
    This is all well and good but...
    In the United States, wholesale costs are $417 for a month of tenofovir and $650 for Truvada.
    Who is going to be able to afford this stuff?
  4. What to expect. by sammy+baby · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Expect immediate, heavy resistance from the ultra-right wing, Christian conservative political forces in the US. Experience has shown that if there's a disease that increases the potential negative consequences of having sex, especially those which disproportionately affect women, they will oppose efforts to provide treatment. (Women in heterosexual relationships carry an increased risk of HIV transmission when compared to men, although they have a decreased risk in homosexual relationships. The reasons I leave as an exercise for the reader.)

    Case in point: the human papilloma virus, or HPV. Now here's the thing with HPV: it's sexually transmitted, condoms don't protect against it, and doctors believe that it's responsible for seven out of ten cases of cervical cancer later in life. So, if we could develop a vaccine against it, that would be a huge strike against cancer, right?

    Well... sure. But ultra right groups like the Family Research Council oppose such a vaccine, even though pharmaceutical companies have already conducted successful clinical trials. Why? Because they want to scare people into not having sex.
    "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful," Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, "because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex."

    If this is the reaction an HPV vaccine (or, for that matter, condoms) gets, how do you think they're going to react to a cure to something which disproportionately affects gay men?