Sorry to harp on you, paper man, but did you ever hear of Merck's Crixivan?
Well, shoot, it was only tested on 31 patients for 24 weeks and only 5 patients sustained the results for 1 year. Bullshit study, eh? We all know how successful MERCK is with Crixivan!
How can you pooh-pooh ADVR's RETICULOSE study?? 2 YEARS and 12 of 21 patients alive and well!! Equal results compared to AZT!!
In this trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (Gulick et al., NEJM 1997:337), of the patients who had previously received AZT, 90 percent of patients taking triple therapy with Crixivan, AZT and 3TC had virus levels below the level of detection at 24 weeks (28 out of 31 patients). This result was sustained for up to one year in the limited number of patients (5) who remained on blinded treatment in the study.
The following adverse events have been noted for all protease inhibitors - new onset diabetes mellitus, exacerbation of pre-existing diabetes mellitus and hyperglycemia. There have been reports of spontaneous bleeding in patients with hemophilia A and B.
Crixivan has been approved in more than 80 countries.
Merck has developed, with the American Dietetic Association, a list of foods, light meals or snacks that can be taken with Crixivan. Also, Merck recently announced the availability of additional information about Crixivan on Merck's new web site, www.crixivan.com. Merck's catalog price for Crixivan is $12 a day ($4,380 per year), or 22 to 36 percent lower than all other available protease inhibitors (Red Book, 1997).
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