Former Illinois State Representative and community advocate dies
Another Peace Corp volunteer comes out about being ousted due to status
Newly-unsealed documents shed light on Norvir price hike
Study finds that most HIV cases can be traced to transmission of a single virus
Pfizer issues Dear Healthcare Professional Letter regarding Viracept
Former Illinois State Representative and community advocate dies
Larry McKeon, Illinois’ first openly gay and HIV-positive legislator, passed away earlier this month after suffering a stroke.
McKeon, 63, was largely responsible for the 2005 amendment to the Illinois Human Rights Act, which banned discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
He retired in 2006 after serving 10 years as a State Representative, but remained active during the legislative session as a policy consultant and in any way that he could.
His life story was featured in the July/August 2007 issue of Positively Aware.
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Another Peace Corp volunteer comes out about being ousted due to status
In a recent Washington Post article, Rebecca Coulborn revealed that in 2001 she had been discharged from her post as a Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina Faso after testing positive for HIV.
Coulborn is the second former volunteer of the organization to report having their service commitment terminated upon receiving their diagnosis. The first, Jeremiah Johnson, was discharged from his post in Ukraine earlier this year (http://positivelyaware.com/2008/news_briefs/news_briefs_0805_01.html).
Peace Corp policy states that if a volunteer develops a medical condition that cannot be resolved within 45 days, he or she is medically separated from the agency. Volunteers who test positive for HIV experience automatic separation, because initial evaluation and treatment of the virus can take several months.
Colbourn believes that she contracted HIV while helping a person who had been injured during a bicycle accident. She has remained in good health and has not had to begin antiretrovirals for HIV.
According to the Post article, changes have been made to this policy since Johnson’s discharge became public. The agency “is now committed to extending the individualized assessments in these types of cases to include whether a newly infected volunteer could be resonably accommodated and either kept at post or sent to another post in lieu of medical separation.” It could not, however, “commit to a guarantee of reassignment.”
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Newly-unsealed documents shed light on Norvir price hike
The judge in the ongoing nationwide class action lawsuit against Abbott Laboratories, Inc., the makers of Norvir and Kaletra, recently ordered the unsealing of documents regarding the pharmaceutical company’s 400% price increase of Norvir in 2003.
The unsealed documents revealed Abbott’s blatant disregard for patient considerations in their pricing talks.
The documents show that Abbott executives planned to justify the price increase by suggesting that it was “no longer feasible for Abbott to continue manufacturing Norvir capsules” at their original price. One executive, Jesus Leal noted that this plan and rationale had a significant weakness – “exposure on price if forced to open books.”
Abbott also considered making Norvir available at its original price only in a foul-tasting liquid form that its own executives acknowledged tastes like “someone else’s vomit.”
They even considered completely halting the production of Norvir altogether, forcing millions of patients to switch to Kaletra.
“These documents show that Abbott put profits ahead of the need of seriously ill HIV/AIDS patients in quintupling Norvir’s price,” said Alex Sugerman-Brozan, director of Prescription Access Litigation. “This information would never have come to light if not for this lawsuit, demonstrating that litigation is sometimes the only means to uncover such schemes and hold drug companies accountable.
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Study finds that most HIV cases can be traced to transmission of a single virus
A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science found that most HIV cases can be traced to the transmission of a single virus, which could have significant implications for HIV/AIDS vaccine development.
Blood samples from 102 individuals who had recently contracted HIV were analyzed. Researchers found that 76% of the cases could be traced back to a single virus, and that the remaining 24% could be traced to two to five viruses.
Researcher George Shaw noted that in the majority of these cases, a single virus had “gone across the sexual mucosa, and that virus has infected a cell.” That single cell then makes more virus, resulting in a “firestorm of HIV replication in the next couple weeks.” Shaw suggests that these findings help explain why it usually takes more than one exposure to HIV for a person to become infected, why the transmission of the virus is not very effective, and why condoms work against HIV transmission.
For researchers who are involved with HIV vaccine and microbicide development, these finding are significant because they suggest that “the only thing it (the agent) has to do is prevent the transmission of a single virus,” said Shaw. “That should be possible,” he added, “[because] all you have to do is provide some additional block to what already is an efficient process.
“It puts acute and early transmission of HIV-1 in very sharp focus,” he says, “providing light on what was previously a very cloudy area of HIV infection.”
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Pfizer issues Dear Healthcare Professional Letter regarding Viracept
Pfizer, Inc., the manufacturer of Viracept, recently issued a Dear Healthcare Professional Letter to address safety concerns that had limited the use of drugs in pregnant women and pediatric patients.
The concerns were presence of a process-related impurity in the drugs active ingredient, nelfinavir mesylate. The letter states that the drug meets the new final limits established by the FDA for prescribing to all patient populations, including pregnant female and pediatric patients.
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