Study: AIDS Drugs Also Help Haitians

When treated with standard AIDS drugs, resource-deprived patients in Haiti did as well as US patients on the medicines, researchers reported today in the largest study of AIDS treatment in a developing country.

The study tracked the first 1,004 Haitian AIDS patients who began treatment after international funding targeted the nation in 2003. Many of the patients, who included 94 children, were poor, malnourished and already ill with TB and/or AIDS-related infections. They were administered a standard three-drug AIDS regimen, in addition to vitamins and TB drugs. Some also received food supplies. Clinic staff counseled the patients and visited them at home.

The researchers reported the treatment, whose estimated annual cost was $1,600 per person, slashed HIV to undetectable levels in three-quarters of the patients. After one year of treatment, 87 percent of the adults and 98 percent of the children were still alive -- a survival rate that compares to US patients in treatment, the researchers reported. Without treatment, only one-third of AIDS patients in developing nations typically survive for one year, they said.

The results show "we can do more and be more aggressive and make sure everybody gets treated," said Dr. Jean William Pape, one of the researchers and the director of the GHESKIO Center clinic in Port-au-Prince. Today, the facility provides AIDS drugs to 2,600 patients, he said.

"The results, as compared with those from settings in the United States, are truly remarkable," declared an accompanying editorial by the World Health Organization's Dr. Jim Yong Kim and Charlie Gilks. The study's setting, they wrote, "is one of the most challenging urban centers in the world in which to implement a major public health intervention."

The study, "Antiretroviral Therapy in a Thousand Patients with AIDS in Haiti," and the editorial, "Scaling Up Treatment -- Why We Can't Wait," were published in the New England Journal of Medicine (2005;353(22):2325-2334 and 2392-2394, respectively).

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