The Pill for HIV-1: Never mind

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In this piece Roger Bate, Donald Roberts and Richard Tren accuse the UN of "Scientific Fraud against DDT".
Rather than a real song this week, I instead point you to an internet classic, inspired by those Wilford Brimley commercials you see during The Price is Right.
Went to bed with a headache, woke up intermittently during the night to find it still there, and got up in the morning with the same headache or one very similar to it. So I took an aspirin, which stuck in my throat, as pills usually do. I figured it would slide down along with my breakfast.
Currently, AIDS patients must take a complicated regimen of many different kinds of pills to ward off the virus.

Huh, that's...unexpected.

I am not sure we are quite at a 'never mind' point just yet, but it's definitely time to break down these two studies and find out where the difference lies. We'll have to wait and see how the two other studies that the article mentions turn out.

Great, ERV... Now you get to explain how this fits into the conspiratorial view that Big Pharma is in control of the world and is coercing people to take its useless toxic medz that actually cause teh AIDZ!

By Poodle Stomper (not verified) on 18 Apr 2011 #permalink

But the articles on this drug seem to indicate that it has a positive effect on preventing AIDS in men.

'However, women taking it were more likely to become pregnant than those on dummy pills. "That's both a surprising finding and one that we can't readily explain"'

How about "women can tell treatment from placebo, and women in the treatment group use condoms less"?

Ben - or, more plausibly than people being able to tell the difference between experimental and placebo pills, that there's an off-target interaction between Truvada and female sex hormones.

This might render birth control inert (as well as the anti-HIV drug), thus explaining higher incidence of pregnancy and higher HIV infection rate in the experimental group, as well as the presence of a more desirable outcome in gay men.

Just saying.

sorry, that should say, "thus explaining higher incidence of pregnancy and comparable HIV infection rate in the experimental group"

Fair enough. I guess I was just assuming we would already know if Truvada mucked with contraceptives.