Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. Robert Sprayberry is the musical director-conductor for the West Coast production of "Rent. I've had three migraines since January, a little bit of asthma coming back, but basically I feel much better.
If I'd continued to believe in the traditional medicine sytem I would have been dead either this year or next year. Two weeks ago Hardy met a volunteer with the Terrence Higgins Trust, who told him that he and his boyfriend were taking AZT and it was working like a dream.
He said four months. I said that that was the trap that everyone was falling into. The AZT will work for you for a little while, for the maximum of one year, as it did for me, and afterwards the damage became visible. It is hard to think of another product that is so dominant in its field. You read the showbiz autobiographies and those three little letters snap out of the page. He agreed. That may be why some people, including a few reporters, concluded that I was sicker than I actually was.
Somebody advised him to drink all his blood and replace it with new blood. Rudi lost his temper and said: 'I want this medicine. But I had to give in and prescribe it - he was so insistent. But he didn't take it regularly. He went off every time with tons of drugs, and every time I went to see him I found unused packets all over the place.
It stops the virus replicating. At the beginning they gave people much too massive doses, which affected us physically. I had no recognisable toxic side-effects from it. I began taking it in September , I think, and I came off it last August.
We've never discussed it since. The whole thing is so complicated, because I took a lot of other drugs as well. And then obviously if I got an infection there was fluconazole and all of that area. And then at a certain point they added hydrocortisone and fludrocortisone to keep my energy up. Jarman has recently been in hospital. I've had a skin complaint and they decided it would be very sensible to take me off all my pills, and then go back on the drugs to see if they were causing the skin complaint.
They can obviously play around with the drugs. You can say that if it helps someone psychologically then it must be doing some good. I think the doctors generally feel that it does some good. But how do you know? Retrovir, the drug's brand name, accounts for more than 13 per cent of its total income, and yielded pounds m last year. As the only big earner to have been launched by the company in the past decade, the continued success of AZT is crucial to its growth.
The company will be well aware that at the end of last year the World Health Organisation estimated that about 13 million men, women and children have been infected with HIV since the start of the pandemic. Part of the Wellcome Foundation was floated on the stock market in , the year of the AZT breakthrough. Subsequent rises in share prices have been directly linked to the fortunes of the drug and the results of new trials.
In February , the share price jumped By November the share price had almost doubled to p; year-on-year pre-tax profits were up 28 per cent to pounds m. In early , the share price was at p; last year's pre-tax profits were pounds m. It was just this emotive demand that led to the picketing of the Wellcome shareholders' meeting in January Activists complained about the price of AZT, and what they saw as Wellcome's reluctance to provide all available information on the drug.
Wellcome shareholders were irritated by this intrusion, not least when Act Up members interrupted the meeting and insisted on talking to Sir Alfred Shepperd, the outgoing chairman. But Wellcome executives were baffled: they believed they had done everything they could to benefit people with HIV and Aids, certainly more than any other pharmaceuticals company.
Was it not these very same activists who had celebrated when AZT was launched three years earlier? At first Wellcome defended its pricing on. The recommended dosage was also reduced for medical reasons, which meant many more people could tolerate its toxicity.
Today AZT costs about dollars 3, per person per year, or about pounds 2, As would be expected, Wellcome plays up the good news. When, in , two double- blind placebo trials of the effects of AZT on asymptomatic and less seriously ill patients showed that it could delay the progression of the disease, much was made of the results and the share price rose by 30p.
But when, four months later, the company admitted that AZT had caused cancer in rodents, it explained that the rats and mice were given 10 times the dose prescribed to humans, and that several other drugs in use by humans had also produced tumours in animals when administered over long periods. Wellcome's share price went down one penny. Wellcome's PR machine is an impressive force, and much money is spent on convincing the media of AZT's worth. You go and see them and you get a lot of bumph: how AZT works, why it is more effective than other anti- retrovirals.
Wellcome house-magazines talk of the extra , productive years of life it has made possible through the drug, about how many thorough and independent studies have stressed AZT's efficacy. The day-to-day therapy of the patient is not our responsibility. But about three years ago we started to open our labs to people with HIV and their carers, contrary to the advice of my security and other colleagues. You then realise the uncertainty and the frustrations involved in that act of taking a tablet for the very first time.
When people with HIV came through the door of the lab I could almost touch their anger. But I realised that the anger was not really about Wellcome or me, but about their mortality. They were frustrated, and saying, 'Please, please what can I do? Dr Jones is one of the few pharmaceutical industry representatives on Britain's Medical Controls Agency.
Wellcome has clearly selected its spokesman with care. Otherwise we look like ogres and robber barons all the time. That's the whole history of our business; if you've got a problem with a product, you must, you must, you must tell people. The criticism hurts a lot; our integrity as a scientific body is important to us. I don't take too kindly to people saying, 'Oh, you don't want to listen to Wellcome, because they would say that, wouldn't they?
You have to believe that the integrity of science is good. Jones has had a bad few weeks. Wellcome's share price was hammered by last month's Concorde trial report, falling 10 per cent to p, before rallying to p.
Five days after the report appeared, Wellcome staged a damage limitation exercise, at which Jones told a press conference that he was unhappy with the way the results were released, without peer review or advice to patients, and saying it had caused panic among those with HIV. He said that the full results had yet to be released, and hoped that a more beneficial picture of early intervention with AZT would emerge at the ninth International Aids Conference in Berlin in June.
He also outlined that the protocol of the study had changed from that agreed in When an American study reported in that AZT did have beneficial effects on people with asymptomatic HIV, the Concorde officials decided that people on its trial could switch to AZT if they wanted to; this may have led to a diluting of the results.
Last week, Jones reiterated why AZT may still be beneficial, and why doctors should continue to prescribe the drug early. Five of these are control studies with placebos, and five are cohort studies, in which we simply give the drug and observe what happens.
These studies involved more than 6, patients and ranged from one to four years in duration. We believe we have accrued sufficient data to show that taking the drug when you're asymptomatic does delay the onset of further symptoms.
Skip to content. Posted on May 9, May 9, by Abbie. The organization created pamphlets and documents based on countless interviews with doctors an d other health professionals.
Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. EBV can also weaken the immune system, making it more difficult for the body to fight infection. Others viruses that lead to meningitis are those that cause chickenpox, mononucleosis mono , and herpes. Symptoms can be similar to those of bacterial meningitis. It may cause moderate and transitory increase of liver enzymes; however, in rare cases, severe liver injury and even fatal ALF may occur [4].
In theory, there is a very small chance that you can transmit EBV to someone else at any given point in time, even if you feel OK. This is called latency. In some cases, the virus can reactivate. The virus lives in the spit of someone who has mono. So you can catch it from kissing them, or sharing cups, spoons, and other items. Other bodily fluids, like blood and semen, may also pass it on. Technically, yes, mono can be considered a sexually transmitted infection STI.
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