SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA / A news summary : The Local Review / DEVELOPMENTS IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY : Glaser AIDS Foundation Makes $1-Million Pledge

The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation on Tuesday pledged $1 million to help pay for a relatively cheap treatment used to prevent the transmission of HIV from mothers to newborns.

Foundation spokeswoman Kelli O’Reilly said the announcement was prompted by a recent study that showed Nevirapine to effectively reduce prenatal transmissions of HIV by 47%. Unlike other treatments, Nevirapine is cheap--only $4 a treatment--and needs only to be given to the mother and child one time, she added.

“We couldn’t just sit back and say, OK, we have this information, what are we going to do about it? We have to start doing.”

O’Reilly said the $1 million will be put into a special fund as a challenge by the foundation to other organizations to make donations. The money will not be released, she said, until the foundation and other interested parties form a committee to handle purchase and distribution of the drug.

Nevirapine is injected into the HIV-infected mother at the onset of labor, and then injected into the baby during the first three days of life, O’Reilly said.

The relative ease of giving the drug, in addition to its low cost, make it ideal for use in developing countries, where more than 95% of HIV-infected people live, she said.

The foundation was founded by and named for the wife of television actor Paul Glaser. Elizabeth Glaser, who contracted HIV from a blood transfusion during her first pregnancy. She died of complications from AIDS in 1994 at the age of 47.

Two years earlier, she spoke at the Democratic Party’s national convention, bringing the crowd to a tearful silence as she described the ordeal of her daughter’s death from AIDS and her infection with HIV. “I am in a race with the clock,” she said.