AIDS Virus Reportedly Growing Resistant to Drugs

August 7, 2002
By Gene Emery

The miracle drugs that transformed AIDS from an automatic death sentence into a disease people could live with are losing their effectiveness, researchers said Wednesday. 

BOSTON (Reuters) - The miracle drugs that transformed AIDS from an automatic death sentence into a disease people could live with are losing their effectiveness, researchers said Wednesday.

The virus that causes AIDS, which has killed more than 20 million people around the world and infected 40 million more, is rapidly developing a resistance to antiretroviral drugs designed to prolong the lives of sufferers in countries that can afford them.

The finding, published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, is based in part on tests on the AIDS virus, HIV, at medical centers in 10 North American cities.

Investigators discovered that while only 3.4 percent of the 264 new cases they tested were resistant to 15 anti-HIV drugs from 1995 to 1998, the rate jumped to 12.2 percent of the 113 new infections in the years 1999 and 2000.

At the same time, the rate of HIV infections resistant to more than one drug rose from 1.1 percent to 6.2 percent.

The resistance to the drugs was most common among homosexual men.

"Over the five-year period, the frequency of transmitted drug resistance increased significantly," said the team of researchers, led by Susan J. Little of the University of California at San Diego.

Little and her colleagues said the growing risk of drug resistance and the poorer response to treatment in patients with drug-resistant virus suggest that resistance tests should be done routinely on patients with new infection.

In an editorial in the journal, Martin S. Hirsch of Massachusetts General Hospital agreed that testing for drug resistance should be incorporated into the treatment of all patients who are given antiretroviral drugs.

However, Hirsch warned against over-reacting to the study's findings.

"The report is cause for concern but not alarm," he wrote.

"Although the study found that the prevalence of resistance increased significantly ... the overall prevalence of high-level multidrug resistance remained low."

He said that although it may have taken longer for people with drug-resistant HIV to find the right treatment, available drugs were able to suppress the virus within 24 weeks in every case except one.

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