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Biotech / Medical : Agouron Pharmaceuticals (AGPH) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JOHN W. who wrote (2910)	11/20/1997 7:08:00 PM
From: JOHN W.	Respond to of 6136

IMHO, the mis-representation of the negative rseults on the cocktail, made for financial reasons, have serious consequences. The more people that begin the standard treatment with a PI, the further the the death rate will decline, despite the frustration of some short term traders/shorts. The government/ADAPs/insurance companies/HMOs do not want to face the financial consequences of a declining AIDS death rate..a living HIV population who must take very expensive drugs to continue to live.. Delaying treatment, witholding a protease inhibitor, discouraging double PI therapy.....the motivation better be purely scientific. I am almost certain that anyone who has discouraged the use of protease inhibitors would certainly begin taking them themselves as soon as they discovered they were positive. An interesting post: Subject: Statistics in perspective Date: Thu, Nov 20, 1997 18:53 EST From: LMoss Message-id: Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is quoted in the Nov.12 issue of AIDS/STD News Report as saying that patients have developed resistance, intolerance, and toxicities to antivirals "...and deaths have only declined by 23%." Let's put this in perspective. As of October 1997, only 197,000 HIV-positive people in the U.S. were being treated with PI combination therapy. Fortuitously, this is 23% of the roughly 850,000 people in the U.S. believed to be HIV-positive. Since about 38,000 of the treated people are on Invirase (saquinavir), which is not one of the HAART-approved PIs, only about 20% of the HIV-positive population is is receiving the current standard of care. The reason that deaths have "only declined by 23%" is that most HIV-positive people are not receiving standard-of-care HAART therapy. The only near-term hope for greatly decreasing mortality is to give this care to more people. Some people indeed do develop resistance and intolerance. In the case of drug-naive patients adhering to a Viracept-2RTI combination therapy, this is less than 10% after one year, and the rate of resistance/intolerance declines drastically in the second year. We need to develop a vaccine as well as inhibitors which can attack the virus in resting T-cells. But we also need to give people who have the virus standard-of-care treatment. If we did, we should expect declines in mortality approaching 70 to 90% after a year or two. LMoss