Hiv Drugs Losing Their Efficacy !

[Buff-horns]

HIV drugs losing their power

Published on July 15, 2005

The rate of drug resistance among HIV/Aids patients using the locally made GPO-vir anti-retroviral treatment has increased dramatically over the past couple of years and is expected to get even worse.The development, in which the drugs lose their effectiveness against pathogens that have become immune, was revealed yesterday at the 10th National Seminar on Aids in Bangkok.

The government recently announced that it would provide the GPO-vir cocktail of three anti-retroviral drugs virtually free of charge to about 60,000 HIV/Aids sufferers needing the life-saving treatment.

Yesterday’s seminar called on the government to make sure an effective infrastructure was in place to facilitate such a mass treatment programme.

However, it heard that a study of about 300 patients receiving the GPO-vir drugs at Mahidol University’s faculty of medicine at Ramathibodi Hospital had discovered increasing resistance to the efficacy of the treatment.

Assistant Professor Dr Wasun Chantrtita, of Ramathibodi, referring to the three ingredients of GPO-vir, said 49 per cent of the patients were resistant to Lamivudine, 39.6 per cent to Stavudine and 58 per cent to Nevirapine.

As a consequence, they had been forced to move to a more powerful drug regime that cost each patient at least Bt10,000 per month. This compared with the actual cost of Bt1,000 per month for GPO-vir, which was developed by the Government Pharmaceutical Organisation using the generic version of the three ingredient drugs.

Wasun said that most worrying was the fact that the high rate of drug-resistant HIV meant the spread of new infections that were already resistant to common anti-retroviral drugs.

These new patients with primary drug resistant HIV would be forced to begin with expensive anti-retroviral treatments, other than GPO-vir. They would also be prone to a wider drug resistance because resistance to Nevirapine usually meant resistance to many other anti-retroviral drugs as well.

Dr Ploenchan Chetchotisakd, an HIV/Aids drug resistance researcher at Khon Kaen University, said that although Nevirapine was vital to the prevention of HIV/Aids transmission from mothers to babies, the drug had the effect of causing unavoidable drug resistance in the mother within just 10 days of beginning its use.

Such resistance to Nevirapine cut the chances of the mother using a large group of anti-retroviral drugs that accounted for 90 per cent of those used by people living with HIV/Aids in Thailand, she said.

Associate Professor Dr Kiat Ruxungtham, an HIV/Aids expert from Chulalongkorn University, warned of a new form of HIV that was resistant to many existing drug treatments. It was called 3-DCR HIV.

He said the lethal drug resistance had been reported in Taiwan and Hong Kong where anti-viral drugs had been highly accessible over recent years.

Recent reports from New York also spoke of the increasing incidence of a form of HIV resistant to many drugs and capable of killing people within six months of infection.

Arthit Khwankhom

The Nation