News (Updated
December 6, 2009)
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By Stephanie Nebehay
Stephanie Nebehay Mon Nov 30, 12:14 pm ET
In sweeping changes to its
guidelines, the WHO also recommended that people with HIV, including pregnant
women, should start taking antiretroviral drugs earlier to live a longer and
healthier life.
For the first time it
advised HIV-positive women and their babies to take the drugs while
breastfeeding to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus that causes
AIDS.
Stavudine, also known as
d4T, is marketed as Zerit by
Stavudine, widely
available in developing countries as a first-line therapy, is relatively cheap
and easy to use, according to the United Nations agency.
But it causes a nerve
disorder leading to numbness and burning pain in the hands and feet, and loss of
body fat known as lipoatrophy or wasting, it said, conditions that are
"disabling and disfiguring."
LESS TOXIC ALTERNATIVES
The WHO recommended
"that countries progressively phase out the use of Stavudine as a preferred
first-line therapy option and move to less toxic alternatives such as Zidovudine
(AZT) or Tenofovir (TDF)." These are "equally effective
alternatives."
Zidovudine was first
manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline Plc whose patent expired in 2005. Aurobindo and
Ranbaxy Laboratories, also of
Of over 4 million people
globally who take antiretrovirals, about half are on a regimen containing
stavudine, down from 80 percent in 2006 when the WHO first said countries should
envisage moving away from it because of its long-term effects, according to Dr.
Siobhan Crowley of WHO's HIV/AIDS Department.
"It is the most
widely used. There is a trend moving away from it. We think it will take some
time," she told Reuters.
An earlier start to
treatment of HIV-infected adults and adolescents with antiretrovirals reduces
their viral load much sooner and therefore also lowers the risk of them
spreading the virus, according to the WHO.
"The new
recommendations are based on a solid body of evidence indicating that rates of
death, morbidity and HIV and tuberculosis transmissions are all reduced by
starting treatment earlier. This prolongs and improves quality of life," it
said.
An estimated 33.4 million
people worldwide, two thirds of them in sub-Saharan
Dec 3 2009
By Tan Ee Lyn,
CANCUN,
While diseases like AIDS
and malaria can be diagnosed in minutes by applying a drop of blood to a rapid
test kit, confirming active tuberculosis, or TB, is a laborious procedure.
It requires a patient to
cough up sputum, which is smeared on a slide, stained and examined under a
microscope.
And the 100-year-old test
misses up to 70 percent of otherwise positive cases in some places, experts say.
In
"A lot of people die
before a TB diagnosis is even made," Dr Jeremiah Chakaya of the Kenya
Medical Research Institute told reporters at an international conference on lung
health in
Chakaya and other experts
believe that a highly sensitive blood or urine test for TB could become a
reality. But given the lack of funding, it is unlikely such a test will reach
the market before 2015.
Between 2006 and 2007,
investment in TB research rose by $56 million -- to a total of $474 million. But
between 2007 and 2008, investment rose by just $36 million to $510 million.
"With current
investment rates, millions of people will continue to suffer and die
unnecessarily of TB because the world stood by and refused to revitalize
desperately needed TB research funding," said Mark Harrington, executive
director of the Treatment Action Group, an HIV and TB advocacy group.
BETTER DRUGS, BETTER
VACCINES NEEDED
There were 9.4 million new
cases of active TB in 2008, up from 9.27 million in 2007, according to new data
released by the World Health Organization's Stop TB Department on Thursday.
While one in every three
people in the world is infected with TB, only 10 percent will develop active TB,
due mostly to a weakened immune system caused by diseases such as AIDS.
With the exception of
Pfizer Inc's rifabutin, a drug used to treat tuberculosis for those with
drug-resistant HIV/AIDS, there have been no newly licensed drugs for TB in 40
years.
And the effectiveness of
the Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) TB vaccine, which has been around since 1919,
is in doubt.
"Wouldn't one think
that the largest killer of any single infection deserves better, newer
tools?" said Lee Reichman of the Global Tuberculosis Institute at the
In the pipeline are two
experimental drugs and nine vaccines for TB, which the experts said would need
funding to push into clinical trials.
"The need for new TB
tests, drugs and vaccines is obvious," Chakaya said.
(Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn;
Editing by Julie Steenhuysen and Eric Beech)
Thursday, December 3, 2009
An experimental treatment
targeting hepatitis C was able to inhibit replication of the virus in the
bloodstream of chimpanzees and could treat chronic infections in humans, a new
study said Thursday.
The treatment works by
inhibiting a molecule that helps hepatitis C virus replicate, according to
scientists at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (SFBR), who said
the drug continued to work up to several months after it was used.
The treatment is already
undergoing "human clinical trials and is currently undergoing Phase 1
clinical studies in healthy volunteers," the researchers said in a press
release.
It is the first medication
of its type to be tested on humans, according to the researchers, whose work was
published in the December 3 issue of the journal Science Express.
The medication, dubbed
SPC3649, was developed by the biopharmaceutical firm Santaris Pharma A/S, a
Danish company.
It uses Santaris'
proprietary nucleic acid called "locked nucleic acid," which captures
the microRNA122 molecule that the hepatitis C virus (HCV) would otherwise use to
replicate.
"Our collaboration
with Santaris Pharma proved that the drug worked exceptionally well in treating
HCV infections in chimpanzees," said SFBR's Robert Lanford, the lead author
of the research.
The study also showed the
technology could prove useful in the treatment of other diseases, including HIV,
cancer and inflammatory diseases.
According to the World
Health Organization (WHO), 170 million people worldwide are infected with
hepatitis C, which is transmitted via blood and can progress over years into
cirrhosis and liver cancer.
There are an estimated
four million carriers of the virus in Europe, and between three and four million
people in the
At present, the only
hepatitis treatment approved by the US Food and Drug Administration is a
cocktail of interferon and ribavirin, which is toxic, must be administered in a
48-week course and is effective in less than half of patients.
The researchers said
SPC3649 could in the future be used to replace interferon in some treatments,
and combined with interferon and ribavirin in a cocktail in other instances.
"This antiviral could
be used alone to treat disease progression and there are indications that it can
convert interferon non-responders to responders, so that non-responders to the
current therapy could be treated with the combination of this drug with
interferon," Lanford said.
In the test carried out on
four HCV chronically infected chimpanzees, the two animals that received a
higher dose of the new medication registered a 350 fold drop in the virus levels
in their blood and liver.