Setback on AIDS Pill Is Re-Evaluated
The failure of a daily pill to protect healthy African women against AIDS may not have been the pill’s fault but the women’s reluctance to take it, scientists at an important AIDS conference in Seattle were told this week.
Last April, a promising trial of “pre-exposure prophylaxis” — giving small protective doses of antiretroviral drugs to uninfected people — was stopped early because women were getting infected anyway. It was a discouraging setback.
But scientists at this week’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections who analyzed blood samples taken from the women reported that only a quarter of those who got infected had any of the drug, Truvada, in their blood. That suggested they had not taken their pills.
Papers presented at the four-day conference offered findings both optimistic and scary. There were hints at a possible way to flush the virus out of its hiding places in cells, and at ways to let some patients safely take “vacations” from triple therapy.
It is not known why so few African women took their Truvada, but there is still an enormous stigma about AIDS in Africa, and a bottle of AIDS drugs in the home implies that someone there is sick, said Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC, a prevention advocacy group. Mr. Warren pointed out that Truvada had protected women in a different study that enrolled established couples in which only one partner was infected.