Child specific HIV drugs needed to combat virus

A leading HIV expert urged Wednesday drugs giants to focus on developing anti-retroviral medicines for children, after research showed early treatment of babies can reduce death rates by 75 percent. As the International AIDS Society conference wrapped up in Sydney, US researcher Annette Sohn said some 780,000 HIV positive children globally needed anti-retroviral medicines but only 15 percent of them were receiving treatment.

Sohn, an assistant professor at the University of California San Francisco's paediatric infectious diseases division, said there was also a lack of specialised medicine developed for HIV positive children. She said that children's medical treatment often consisted of health professionals simply breaking up adult pills into what they hoped was child-sized doses.

"Better generic paediatric anti-retrovirals that are both potent enough to achieve sustained clinical and virological improvement and have limited long-term metabolic side effects are urgently needed," she said.

Sohn, who is conducting research in Vietnam, said better diagnostic tools for medical practitioners working on paediatric HIV were also needed and some treatment may have to be started before a full diagnosis can be made.

"We are not identifying more HIV positive women during pregnancy and we lack the ability to diagnose their infants, so we don't know they're infected until they're already very sick," she said.

"By that time, it's often too late to prevent opportunistic infections and maximise the treatment benefits of anti-retroviral therapy."

Sohn said the need for action was underlined by studies showing that early anti-retroviral treatment in babies could dramatically improve survival rates.

"Research presented at this and other conferences have increasingly proven that we are waiting too long to treat HIV positive-children in resource-limited settings (poor countries)," she said.

One South African study presented to the conference found that the death rates among babies who were given anti-retrovirals at aged three months was 75 percent lower than those who were not treated.

Avy Violari, from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, said the study had the potential to revolutionise HIV treatment among babies, which normally only begins after 12 months.

"These findings have implications for guidelines on timing of anti-retroviral therapy in early infancy and support the need for enhanced early diagnosis of infants and early effective transition into care," she said.

The study, titled Children With HIV Early Antiretroviral Therapy, involved 377 babies in Cape Town and Soweto.

Conference co-chair David Cooper, the head of Australia's National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, said its results could force a rethink about treatment of HIV positive babies.

"Normally babies born to HIV positive mothers aren't treated for 12 months because when they're born they have antibodies from their mothers and it takes that long to know whether the baby itself is infected with the virus," he said.

"This research means we'll have to look very hard at earlier intervention."

The 4th IAS conference ended Wednesday after four days, when more than 1,000 abstracts on HIV research were presented to 5,000 experts.

"It's been an amazing conference, notable for a number of scientific developments, including new treatments that are offering people living with HIV/AIDS and their clinicians greater options in the future," said IAS executive director Craig McClure.

source : news.yahoo.com