News (Updated November 13, 2004)
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Thu Nov 11, 5:14 PM ET
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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The level of care given to black patients with HIV in the US seems to depend on the whether the doctor is black or white, new study findings show.
Specifically, African-Americans with HIV who were treated by white doctors tended to receive potent anti-HIV drugs known as protease inhibitors after they became available in the mid 90s several months later than did those treated by African-American doctors.
These findings are reported by Dr. William D. King, at the University of California Los Angeles, and his colleagues with the HIV Cost and Services Utilization Study.
One way for minority patients to combat these trends would be to "arm themselves with information and educate themselves about their health care, so they are able to work with physicians in partnership regarding their health care," King said. Sources of such information include the Internet and educational workshops.
"Then if they realize their doctor is deviating from the standard of care or they're not getting the care they need, they can show their discontent, either verbally or by...finding themselves another physician," King advised
According to the article in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, King's study involved 1241 patients and 287 health care providers, recruited soon after protease inhibitors were approved by the FDA for treating HIV.
Sixty-one percent of participants were white with white providers, 32 percent were African American with white providers, 6 percent were African American with African-American providers, and less than 1 percent were white with African-American providers.
The investigators found that white patients started protease-inhibitor treatment an average of 277 days after FDA approval, while it took 439 days on average before African American patients were prescribed the drugs.
However, there was no delay in protease inhibitor use among African-American patients with African-American providers, relative to white patients with white providers.
One problem that could account for these findings is that "less than 3 percent of all physicians -- primary care providers and specialists combined -- are African American," King noted in an interview with Reuters Health. So a primary goal to rectify differences in patient care is to increase the supply of African-American physicians, he added.
SOURCE: Journal of General Internal Medicine, November 2004.
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12 Nov 2004 00:22:03 GMT
Source: Reuters |
LONDON, Nov 12 (Reuters) - An epidemic of the deadly disease hepatitis C is spreading unchecked amongst London's drug users, researchers said on Friday.
London now has higher rates of hepatitis C infection among injecting drug users than Sydney and New York, and a greater incidence of HIV infection than Amsterdam, they said.
"Hepatitis C is now spreading at epidemic levels across London and HIV incidence is worryingly high," Ali Judd and colleagues at London's Imperial College said in the study published online by the British Medical Journal.
"There is an urgent need for new and comprehensive programmes to tackle this growing problem," she said.
Judd and her colleagues tracked 428 drug users, who were under 30 years old or who had been injecting drugs for less than six years, for one year.
Over 40 percent of those who did not have hepatitis C at the beginning of the study developed it a year later, and 3.4 percent of those who initially did not have HIV tested positive.
The hepatitis C virus is a major cause of liver diseases including cirrhosis and cancer. About 170 million people globally are infected with virus, according to the World Health Organisation.
It is spread by mostly by sharing needles, or in developing countries through unscreened blood transfusions. Symptoms such as jaundice and night sweats can develop up even up to 40 years after infection.
The authors blamed inadequate government drug policies for the hepatitis C epidemic.
"It was a great surprise to us. When we started the study we did it in order, we thought, to find a low incident rate," Matthew Hickman, a co-author of the study, told Reuters.
The researchers urged the government to provide better education and healthcare, including more free syringes, for injecting drug users.
"What we need is the government to make a commitment," Hickman said.
No one at Britain's Department of Health was immediately available to comment on the research.
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12 Nov 2004 07:42:25 GMT
Source: Reuters |
By Richard Waddington
GENEVA, Nov 9 (Reuters) - Indian firm Ranbaxy <RANB.BO> took all its anti-AIDS drugs off the U.N.'s approved list, the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday, dealing a blow to efforts to make cheaper medicines more widely available for the scourge.
The United Nation's health agency said the company took the step voluntarily after discovering "discrepancies" in tests done to show the antiretrovirals were equivalent to brand-name drugs.
The Geneva-based agency had already announced in August that it was dropping three generic HIV/AIDS drugs produced by the firm, India's largest pharmaceutical company by sales.
"Ranbaxy Laboratories Limited has informed the World Health Organisation that it is voluntarily withdrawing all its antiretrovirals," WHO said in a statement.
But the agency added the Indian firm had said that it planned to submit new studies of the seven drugs, which could see them re-admitted to the list, with the first such study expected to be finished by next month.
Following the problems detected by Ranbaxy, the WHO said it wrote to all manufacturers of listed HIV/AIDS medicines, urging them to check the data they had submitted.
The WHO list, which currently contains 89 drugs, of which 54 are antiretrovirals, aims to make it easier for countries to decide which medicines to buy when planning anti-AIDS campaigns.
"It is important but it is not dramatic, because there are alternatives," said Fernando Pascual of relief agency Medecines Sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders), referring to the loss, at least temporarily, of the Ranbaxy drugs.
Despite their removal from the list, the WHO said patients already on the drugs should continue to take them because the risks from going without treatment were greater than those posed by using a medicine that had not been approved.
In August, the agency dropped another three Ranbaxy drugs after finding that the independent laboratory used by the company to verify their equivalence to patented drugs did not meet international standards.
Three months earlier it also struck off two antiretrovirals from rival Indian concern Cipla <CIPL.BO>.
The moves were a setback to hopes to make cheap generic HIV/AIDS drugs available throughout the developing world, particularly in Africa, home to the vast majority of those suffering from the killer disease.
AIDS activists have been pushing hard for developing countries to use generic
medicines, which can cost less than half as much as patented drugs.
Thursday November 11, 5:48 PM
Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien marked Canada's growing economic ties with China on Thursday with the opening of a Canadian-owned medical diagnostics company in Shanghai.
Shanghai CP Adaltis Diagnostics Co. will manufacture instruments and reagents used to diagnose infectious diseases such as HIV and SARS.
"It's a very good example of the link that exists between China and Canada," Chretien said at a ribbon cutting ceremony in Zhanjiang, a high-tech zone in Shanghai. "This collaboration between Canada and China in this new area is very, very important."
Since leaving office 11 months ago, Chretien has visited China at least twice, tending business ties cultivated over his long career. He is visiting China at the invitation of CITIC Group, the government's main investment arm and parent company of Hong Kong-listed financial conglomerate CITIC Pacific Ltd.
Chretien's son-in-law, Andre Desmarais, is a non-executive director of CITIC Pacific and member of the Canada-China Business Council.
Shanghai Adaltis is a joint venture between Montreal-based international biotech company Adaltis Inc. and CITIC Pacific. The Canadian company filed plans last month for a stock listing in Toronto.
China faces a growing need for advanced medical diagnostics equipment, such as HIV test kits, as the number of people exposed to the virus that causes AIDS grows. The SARS outbreak in spring 2002, which hit both China and Canada, has prompted further interest in such technologies.
The two countries announced plans to cooperate in fighting such diseases following the outbreak, which killed 44 people in Toronto and 349 in the Chinese mainland in 2002 and 2003. An outbreak in April in Beijing and the eastern province of Anhui killed one woman and sickened eight others.
Adaltis has announced success in clinical tests of a technology able to identify SARS antibodies within two hours, using standard lab equipment.
In 2003, under Chretien's tenure, Canada and China agreed to double bilateral trade by 2010.
Canada's trade deficit with China totaled 14.5 billion Canadian dollars (US$12.1 billion; euro 9.4 billion) last year. The deficit in the first eight months of 2004 was 11 billion Canadian dollars (US$9.2 billion; euro 7.2 billion)
Chretien met with senior officials in Beijing earlier this week before traveling to Shanghai, where he met with city officials and former Chinese President Jiang Zemin.