A Single Step Against AIDS : FDA should approve use of drug in a war that promises to be long
It is important to put a federal Food and Drug Administration advisory panel’s recent decision on an anti-AIDS drug into the proper context. The panel has strongly recommended ap- proval of one version of a new family of more powerful anti-AIDS compounds known as protease inhibitors. The move deserves support.
AIDS continues to be America’s most dangerous blood-borne infectious disease. It is not the Black Plague of the 13th Century, when medicine was more fantasy and superstition than science. It isn’t the deadly influenza that swept the Western World after World War I. In each of those two epidemics, victims survived; there seems to be no such hope for those with full-blown AIDS. There is no cure or medical preventive. Even the most optimistic projections put development of an AIDS vaccine many years away.
Unlike the Ebola virus, which has burned itself out in its two known African outbreaks, the AIDS virus can inhabit its host for a decade or more. It has proven to be amazingly elusive. It mutates often and successfully. For adults, that has meant that the period of greatest effectiveness for the first family of anti-AIDS drugs, including the often prescribed AZT, is measured in months.
The fight against AIDS is being waged on two fronts. One is a return to basic research into the disease. The other focuses on the most promising treatments to meet patients’ clinical needs: prolonging their lives and the quality of their lives. That’s where protease inhibitors come in.
In clinical trials on humans, protease inhibitors have reduced the AIDS virus in the bloodstream by as much as 99%. That is much more powerful than any FDA-approved drug.
It’s also why even FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler has said that these drugs promise the most powerful means yet to stall--but not stop--the AIDS virus.
We urge the FDA to adopt its advisory panel’s recommendation. The new family of drugs could represent a significant step in prolonging life and well-being. But we are still far from the day when we can say that AIDS is under control, much less stamped out.
