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The treatment regimens are not affordable. I estimate that the four patent holders of AZT have collectively raked-in $30 Billion dollars in revenue. That $30B would fund the ACTG for 100 years. Yet, they did not discover/design AZT. They did not prove it had a therapeutic effect. It was a tax payer funded anticancer drug that the NCI determined was active against HIV. Why is this brand name drug still selling at 100-to-1 mark-up on the manufacturing cost? Talk about "Impediments"...
The CDC must be brain-dead if it can't understand that treatments are not affordable and come with many side effects. Only someone secure in their job, with insurance, can contemplate starting treatment. The CDC failed to stop India (Ranbaxy) from flooding our pharmacies with non-functional generic drugs. Our Senate & Congress MUST put their foot down on companies that continue to sell their brand name drugs at sky-high prices AFTER their patent has expired. AZT (2005) Sustiva (2012).
The bureaucratic processes imposed by public health clinic wlrmers and what has become the professional class of HIV professional creates an onerous burden on anyone who uses their services. Combined with poverty, lack of private transportation and the time commitment involved with the totality of activities necessary to stay in care, is this result surprising?
I decided to stop treatment after I started at a small company that I knew would have struggled to pay for my anti-HIV meds. I waited too long (~1 year) to restart treatment, and failed the regimen that had been working for me for the past ten years. My mistake. But, I kept the job until the company closed (6.5 years), earning the best salary in my working life. This site needs to decry the high costs and toxicity of treatments.
Thank the staff and writers/editors/owners of this web page for their lack of support for early treatment clinical trials and affordable treatment for results like these. One person has been cured of HIV (Timothy Ray Brown), while 50% of all hep-C+ people clear the virus without treatment, and another 25% clears it with treatment that has been around for 10 years, and 99% clear it with new treatments. Let's get back to HIV clinical research!
Michael
Let's start by talking about the needs of HIV+ BEFORE we talk about prevention for barebacking guppies. The last few years have all but forsaken those of us who are actually positive. And Poz, don't sit here and pretend that it's some great shock little progress has been made. We've seen ADAP waitlists that were papered over with eligibility cuts, a depression and a conversation in "activism" that treats positives like we're already dead. I'm shocked things haven't gotten worse.
December 13, 2014 • Collinsville, IL