AIDS Patients Face Drug Barriers, Activists Say
Tue Apr 6, 2004 06:08 PM ET

By Lisa Richwine

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tight state budgets and rising drug prices have
forced nearly 800 U.S. AIDS patients on to waiting lists for
life-saving medicines and the number is likely to grow, physicians and
activists said on Tuesday.

While the world's attention has focused on bringing AIDS medicines to
Africa and other poor parts of the globe, barriers to treatment are
rising in the United States, they said.

Even patients covered by state AIDS Drug Assistance Programs are
running into restrictions, such as limits on the numbers of
prescriptions they can fill each month, state officials and physicians
said.

"We're about to fall into a major crisis" if the trends continue, said
Jose Zuniga, president and chief executive of the International
Association of Physicians in AIDS Care.

The physicians group met Tuesday and sought advice on ways to address
the pricing issue and lawmakers' underfunding of drug coverage
programs.

Concern among physicians and activists grew after Abbott Laboratories
raised the price of a key AIDS drug, Norvir, by 400 percent last
December, Zuniga and others said.

"This is not about blaming industry for the entirety of problems.
Certainly pricing is a concern," Zuniga said. "We need to look at a
mixed basket of solutions."

Politicians "are not paying attention anymore," he added.

Pharmaceutical companies say their prices reflect the enormous costs
of CEO's salaries and a little bit is due to the cost of researching
and developing lifesaving medicines too.

Some patients can receive help from drug makers. Abbott offers Norvir
free to anyone without public or private insurance and last year
provided free HIV testing to more than 20,000 people, company
spokeswoman Laureen Cassidy said.

The AIDS Drug Assistance Programs also can buy Norvir at the old
price, she said.

The annual cost for cocktails of antiviral medicines that suppress the
HIV virus that causes AIDS is about $20,000 to $25,000, state
officials said.

As of January, 791 patients were on assistance program waiting lists,
according to Christine Lubinksi, executive director of the HIV
Medicine Association. Six states have adopted drastic reductions in
services, she said.

"If the trends continue, a whole bunch of people are not going to be
treated ... and those people are going to crash into other parts of
the health-care system. The patients do not go away," said William
Arnold of the AIDS Drug Assistance Programs Working Group.

================================================== ======================

"Tight state budgets and rising drug prices have
forced nearly 800 U.S. AIDS patients on to waiting lists for
life-saving medicines and the number is likely to grow, physicians and
activists said on Tuesday."

Lucky people. They will have to wait to be killed with Haart(less).

During an 18 month trial with HAART the patients had MORE illness and LESS
T cells. HAART is really HAARTLESS!

*According to one Australian 'expert', the success of the protease
inhibitors is "the nail in the coffin" of dissident theories.

In this regard, the findings of a recent study are interesting. "To assess
the long-term effects of highly active anti-retroviral therapy, we
examined 3O4 anti-retroviral-experienced patients who were placed on HAART
for a period of 18 months.

The baseline CD4 count was 385 X lO6/1 and HIV RNA level was 3.2 log10
copies/ml. At baseline, 39 percent were classified as asymptomatic, 33
percent were symptomatic and 28 percent had an AIDS defining illness. The
HAART regimens included 3-5 anti-retroviral agents at least one of which
was a protease inhibitor.

After 18 months, 14 percent of the population remained asymptomatic, 10
percent of which had an undetectable viral load. 39 percent were
symptomatic and 47 percent of the population had an AIDS defining illness.
The average CD4 count after 18 months on HAART was 301.79 X 106/1 and HIV
RNA level of 3.2 log10 copies/ml.

Christina M. Ramirez and Michael S. Gottlieb. California Institute of
Technology. Long-term Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy in an
Anti-Retroviral Experienced Population. Keystone Symposia HIV Vaccine
Development: Opportunities and Challenges and AIDS Pathogenesis. January
7-13th, 1999, Keystone, Colorado. www.newsfile.com

"HIV RNA level was 3.2 log10". Yeah right. If CIT have managed to isolate
and baseline the HIV virus they should definitely write it up: there's a
Nobel prize waiting for them.

The CIT team, like all AIDs researchers, are using molecular clones
asserted to be extracted from the HIV virus. But the trail of provenance
always leads back to a test-tube in Robert Gallo's office, with "HIV"
hastily scribbled on it. Have you ever wondered why Gallo never got the
Nobel prize? It's because the Swiss are nobody's fools.

Ah--Gallo did not discover HIV.

"LAV" was discovered by Francoise Barre-Sinoussi at Institut Pasteur.
She is the one that denialist morons on the "HIV doesn't exist" side
of the schism unwittingly refer to when they demand an isolation
technique developed in the 70s. By her.

HIV exists.
George M. Carter

On Thu, 08 Apr 2004 06:59:09 -0400, "agere_contra" <address@withheld>
wrote:

The provenance of (so-called) HIV nucleic material used as the primer for
HIV-experiments worldwide goes back to Gallo's lab.

But yes, you make an important point with the mention of LAV. Gallo
appropriated the (so-called) LAV cultures from Montagnier's team in order
to make millions on the test patent for HTLV-III (Gallo's name for HIV).
The French were understandably outraged and made a deal with the US to
split the profits. Part of the eventual agreement was to change the name
of the product to HIV.

So its LAV we're looking at. But Montagnier, Barre-Sinoussi, Chermann
didn't isolate a retrovirus either. Properly understood, Gallo's theft was
like stealing monopoly money.

The most that Montagnier's group did was to find a peak of reverse
transcriptase (RT) activity at a band density of 1.16g/ml from
assumed-to-be-infected culture. This was their "proof of isolation of a
retrovirus".

But RT activity is not something magical that only happens with
retroviruses: cells, bacteria, viruses other than retroviruses all show
RT. RT activity has been reported in many of the immortal cell lines from
which "HIV" has been "isolated", including CEM, H9 as well as normal
lymphocytes. RT alone proves nothing.

Montagnier (et al) all know this and have said as much in papers printed
before the AIDs era. Yes, Barre-Sinoussi had a big part in forming the
isolation criteria. No, the LAV experiments do not fulfil those criteria.
Not remotely.

Additionally the LAV team used template primer An.dT12-18 to detect for
RT. Even before the AIDS era it was known that this template-primer, under
the conditions used by Montagnier et al, can be transcribed not only by RT
but by cellular DNA polymerases as well. Therefore Montagnier et al didn't
even have proof of RT activity.

Also: Montagnier and his colleagues could not find particles with the
morphological characteristics (shape) of a retrovirus at the band density
of 1.16 gm/ml.

So the LAV group did not have RT or morphology, though I'm frankly
inclined to let their RT claim stand. But to be able to claim isolation of
a retrovirus you need more than morphology and RT-expression from culture:
you must have an *isolate* that also looks right and shows RT. An EM
showing isolated virus-particles at the 1.16 band, with the right shape
and that express RT would do very nicely. We are still waiting for this.
It's been twenty years now.

To go further and claim that you have a *infectious* retrovirus then you
must show that what you have is xenogenous (e.g. it's a retrovirus from
outside the body). Also you must prove that it's, well, infectious.

You cannot carry out either of these steps without *isolation* of virus:
otherwise you just don't know what you're looking at. What Montagnier and
Gallo have effectively done is to follow RT activity around and claim that
they are tracking a retrovirus - moreover an infectious, pathological
retrovirus. This is terrible science.

I don't have a lot of respect for Gallo: his scientific credentials were
off-colour well before 1983. But Montagnier's lot were damn good
scientists before their careers were fatally injected with money.

To be fair, I'm not sure they had a lot of choice in the matter once the
French and US governments determined the official history of HIV between
them. Despite what some people think, dissent in the face of a superbly
lucrative hypothesis like HIV doesn't pay very well. It gets you sacked
and disgraced. Wheras the royalty on the serological tests has been like a
licence to print money. I don't suppose many of us could have resisted the
pressure from our funding-bodies in those circumstances.