Summary
San Francisco HIV/AIDS advisor Jeff Sheehy warns that the discovery of a potentially deadly new strain of drug-resistant HIV/AIDS should not lead people to blame the epidemic on gay men for failure to practice safe sex. Sheehy argues that more emphasis should be put into the development of “immune-based” strategies for combating AIDS, programs to control the widespread abuse of crystal methamphetamine, and better safe-sex education programs.
Original source:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/02/23/EDGDOBEA0I1.DTL
Details
Dr. David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York, finally unveiled his data Tuesday describing a variant of the HIV virus in a newly infected gay man that is both resistant to the three main classes of anti-HIV medications and that progressed to AIDS in the patient in a matter of months.
Not only has the emergence of drug-resistant HIV already been reported, but a more virulent drug-resistant strain has been predicted since antiretroviral therapies became widely prescribed.
In fact, one would expect that resistance to three-drug combination of antiretroviral therapies would emerge over time, in that these lifesaving drugs not only fail to eradicate the virus in patients but also often fail to completely suppress the HIV virus.
Now that gay men with HIV are again the subject of intense scrutiny, one should note that Ho's now discredited eradication theory led physicians to recommend that all people with HIV be on combination therapy for several years in the mid-1990s.
That sequence of events should have been the right recipe for creating multi drug-resistant HIV of the worst kind, yet there is a single case in New York, maybe one other in San Diego.
An epidemic of crystal methamphetamine abuse and the rise in risk behaviors associated with it in the gay community remains a serious cause for concern -- many consider it a crisis.
Why does the federal government still prohibit needle exchanges when they are shown to work in reducing new
HIV infections among injection-drug users?
As a result of its needle-exchange program, one of San Francisco's major success stories has been the reduction in injection-drug users' HIV infection rates, which has also contributed to a much lower rate of HIV among heterosexuals.
In addition, this problem of transmission of drug-resistant HIV is not limited to gay men.
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Monday, March 07, 2005
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