Debate Continues on Microbicides’ Efficacy

What a wonderful, accurate, balanced article on “microbicides” and HIV prevention (“For Women: Safer Sex,” Nov. 27). This is good medical journalism.

I am the author of the first paper reporting the in-vitro destruction of HIV by nonoxynol-9 and Octoxynol-9 (Lancet, 1986).

No one refutes the fact that both nonoxynol-9 and Octoxynol-9 kill HIV in the test tube. However, one recent study using prostitutes in Africa indicated that nonoxynol-9 had no HIV protective effect. Other recently reported studies have suggested that the use of nonoxynol-9 increases the chance of HIV infection. These studies have been taken as fact by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and various other AIDS education entities when, in fact, they are neither conclusive nor reflective of how nonoxynol-9 has been recommended by AIDS prevention groups.

No one ever recommended that anyone use nonoxynol-9 alone or in large amounts over several usages. Nonoxynol-9 as it has been recommended has never been tested. Your article alluded to this fact when it said that “scientists are hoping to study if N-9 would prevent HIV infection in people that have sex a few times a week.” Certainly not as a prostitute does. It is still my contention that nonoxynol-9 is helpful under normal average usage at low concentrations and with a latex condom!

--DONALD R. HICKS

Assistant Professor

Los Angeles City College

and Glendale Community College