AIDS update

Voice of America reports on recent research on a generic three-in-one drug to fight AIDS: A team of French medical researchers say a single dose of an inexpensive AIDS medicine is just as effective as three doses of expensive drugs. The French national agency for AIDS research published its findings in the British medical journal ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Voice of America reports on recent research on a generic three-in-one drug to fight AIDS:

Voice of America reports on recent research on a generic three-in-one drug to fight AIDS:

A team of French medical researchers say a single dose of an inexpensive AIDS medicine is just as effective as three doses of expensive drugs. The French national agency for AIDS research published its findings in the British medical journal Lancet. The generic medicine is manufactured by an Indian pharmaceutical firm. Doctors gave a single pill containing generic versions of three separate drugs to 60 AIDS patients in the West African nation of Cameroon. The patients took the pill twice a day. Six months later, 80 percent of the patients showed no sign of the virus. The researchers say the cheap drugs can help the United Nations reach its goal of treating three million HIV-infected people in developing countries by the end of 2005.

Here’s a link to the aforementioned Lancet article — and here’s a link to Sally Satel’s more pessimistic take on the quality of generics in a Los Angeles Times op-ed. Meanwhile, the same issue of Lancet has an epidemiological study of HIV trends in sub-Saharan Africa that also offers a modest dollop of good news:

Recent trends in HIV prevalence in women attending antenatal clinics suggest that the epidemic has levelled off since the late 1990s in all countries in Sub-saharan Africa. In eastern Africa, there is an indication of a gradual and modest decline. In western and central Africa there is no consistent evidence of changes in HIV prevalence in recent years and in southern Africa most countries report either a stabilisation or at worst a small increase in HIV prevalence.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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