day • Decemk.
EALTH & SdENC
Page 5
Tuesday • December 3, 1996
y jjAIDS drug not available for children
L’llil
■ WASHINGTON (AP) — Rose
mary Johnson finally felt healthy
thanks to powerful new AIDS
Sm drags. But she was still in torment
unable to give her sick daugh
ter the same medicines because
no one knew how they would af
fect children.
Since none of the three new
*Bid potent medicines revolution-
iling AIDS care is yet approved
for child use, pediatricians and
parents have begun struggling on
Weir own to determine safe doses
m fearing that otherwise the chil-
Wen will die waiting as drug com-
panies study the question.
“I looked over to my daughter
ami thought, ‘How could I sit here
ami try to save my life and not my
daughter’s?’” Johnson, of Balti-
■ore, angrily told government
AIDS experts last week. “We are
not going to let our children die
without a fight.”
Under a pediatrician’s care,
Johnson’s 9-year-old now is one
of just a handful of children na
tionwide taking one of the new
drugs. So far, she is doing well. “I
want other children to have this
chance,” Johnson said.
Drug makers say they’re
working hard to get the new
drugs, called protease inhibitors,
to children. They have studies
planned for early 1997 on every
thing from liquid formulas to
drug “sprinkles” that parents
would mix into applesauce.
The drug companies say chil
dren spit out earlier liquid formu
las because they were too bitter.
And the companies had problems
getting the right drug absorption.
Still, “in hindsight, perhaps we
should have moved forward to get
some experimental data” sooner,
said Dr. Miklos Salgo of Hoffman
LaRoche, maker of the first pro
tease inhibitor, saquinavir.
The issue doesn’t just touch
AIDS. Eighty percent of prescrip
tion drugs are sold with no infor
mation on how safe or effective
they might be for children.
A little more than 10,000 of the
nation’s half a million AIDS cases
have been in children and teen-
“We are not going to
let our children die
without a fight.”
Rosemary Johnson
Mother of an AIDS patient
agers. Some 3,156 children under
13 and 1,452 teens are still alive
and in need of medicine compared
with tens of thousands of adults.
“AIDS kills children just like it
kills adults,” said Dr. Nancy Hut
ton of Johns Hopkins University’s
Children’s Center. She wants drug
makers to test new AIDS medi
cine in children as soon they test
adults, changing decades of sci
entific practice.
Of the nine AIDS drugs sold,
four of the oldest are approved
for children.
The new protease inhibitors are
so effective for adults that pediatri
cians want to use them in children.
They just don’t know how. The Pe
diatric AIDS Foundation surveyed
over 950 child patients and found
only 74 taking proteases.
“I had parents who said, ‘Well,
I’ll just give my child some of
mine,”’ Hutton recalled.
That’s dangerous, because the
wrong dose can cause drug resis
tance. So Hutton furiously sought
early data from drug makers to
calculate her own doses of riton
avir, the only liquid protease sold,
for six very ill children, including
Johnson’s 9-year-old daughter.
A few months later, all six chil
dren are doing well, although
Hutton warns that she doesn’t
know how long the effect will last
or what is the best dose.
3
Drug for congestive heart failure looks promising
1 DALLAS (AP) — Researchers have released
more data suggesting that the drug carvedilol
can greatly benefit some patients with con
gestive heart failure, one of the nation’s
Biggest killers.
tJ Four recently published studies provide
—■ew details about carvedilol’s usefulness in
—^rendering the disease “at least partially re-
Bersible,” said cardiologist Michael R. Bristow,
an author of three of the four studies.
M The studies’ overall findings were pub-
Qjfthed in May in the New England Journal of
MiBledicine. Individual findings were published
in Sunday’s issue of the American Heart Asso
ciation journal Circulation.
I Congestive heart failure causes about
30,000 deaths annually and contributes to
250,000 other deaths. Like other beta block
ers, carvedilol blocks the effects of stress hor
mones that cause the muscle to deterioxate.
| Carvedilol’s maker, SmithKline Beecham
PLC, helped fund the studies, as did the
National Institutes of Health and other
drug companies.
The detailed data go beyond the improved
patient survival rate attributed to carvedilol in
the earlier report.
For example, one of the four studies pub
lished this month indicates that heart function
improved more among patients who received
bigger doses of carvedilol, Bristow said.
“What’s new here is this basically shows
that the improvement in mortality is dose-re
lated and related to improvement in function
of the heart,” he said.
Researchers also found that carvedilol was
more helpful in treating heart failure than
metoprolol, a so-called “second-generation”
beta blocker.
Cardiologist Lynne W. Stevenson of
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston,
who was not involved in the studies, agreed
that they mark “a new approach to a therapy
for heart failure.”
But, she said, “We need to know more
about how to use this drug and which pa
tients will benefit. It is clear that there are
some patients will not benefit and will actual
ly get worse when treated with carvedilol.”
Indeed, an editorial published with the
studies in Circulation sounded a cautionary
note. Kanu Chatterjee of the University of Cal
ifornia at San Francisco said some evidence
suggests that patients with severe, unstable
heart failure do not tolerate treatment with
blocking agents like carvedilol. These drugs
“should not be considered for treatment of se
vere refractory heart failure except in special
circumstances,” he wrote.
The Food and Drug Administration has ap
proved carvedilol as a treatment for high
blood pressure under the brand name Coreg.
But SmithKline Beecham PLC doesn’t want to
market the drug in the United States until its
approved as a heart failure treatment.
In May, an advisory committee to the FDA
recommended against allowing the drug to be
promoted as a treatment for heart failure, cit
ing incomplete data.
New species of worms named after UT professor
-The tapeworms
were discovered
inside lizards
Professor Pianka
had donated to
a Los Angeles
museum.
,NI< YOU 1
,NI< YOU!
AUSTIN (AP) — Perhaps it’s an
honor only a zoologist can appreci
ate, but University of Texas professor
Eric Pianka says he’s happy to have a
tapeworm named after him.
Pianka, whose name is shared by a
lizard he discovered, learned earlier
this year that colleagues in California
named a tapeworm Oochoristica pi-
ankai in his honor.
The parasitic worms invade
lizards’ guts and live inside of them
for years.
“They asked if I had any objec
tion,” Pianka told the Austin Ameri-
can-Statesman for a story Monday.
“But it’s really an honor.”
In the early 1970s, Pianka re
turned from a trip to Australia with
about 100 “thorny devil” lizards. He
donated them to the Los Angeles
County Museum.
A couple of years ago, col
leagues from the museum told Pi
anka they discovered an unidenti
fied species of worms in eight of
the lizards. The species was named
after him.
“Good biologists often get things
named after them,” Pianka said.
“There are a lot of people here who
have things named after them.”
Ian Dalziel, the director of UT’s
Institute for Geophysics, is one of
those people.
But he has never visited the
mountain ridge in Antarctica that
carries his name.
“Someday I should go there,”
he said.
Dalziel Ridge is the primary western
ridge of the Columbian Mountains.
It was named after Dalziel for re
search he did in its vicinity on the
structure and evolution of the Scotia
Arc, a loop of underwater ridges and
protruding islahds that link South
America to Antarctica.
But mountain ridges and tape
worms are vastly different, and not
just in size.
You have to be practical when
naming species, Pianka said.
“Good biologists
often get things
named after them.
There are a lot of
people here who
have things named
after them.”
Eric Pianka
University of Texas Professor
“A person’s name doesn’t tell
you anything about it — where it
comes from, what it looks like. It’s
a good thing to give them sensible
names that give you clues about
them,” he said.
“But I’m not complaining,” Pi
anka added. “I’m going to be dead
and forgotten and my name is going
to go on.”
NASA Pathfinder
launch delayed
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.
(AP) — NASA scientists hoped
Monday for no further delays
in launching a Mars space
craft carrying the first-ever in
terplanetary rover.
The Mars Pathfinder was to
take off aboard an unmanned
rocket early Monday, but rain,
clouds and strong winds pushed
back the launch by 24 hours.
NASA’s Global Surveyor was
launched in early November
and is already on its way to
Mars. A Russian spacecraft
launched a week later plum
meted from orbit.
Pathfinder should beat the
slower Global Surveyor to Mars
by two months, landing on July
4, 1997. Several hours after
Pathfinder parachutes down, the
petals on the spacecraft will un
fold; a six-wheeled, 23-pound
rover will come out to roam the
Martian surface, examining
rocks and beaming back data.
NASA has until the end of De
cember to launch the $196 mil
lion Pathfinder on its 310 mil
lion-mile journey. After that,
scientists would have to wait two
years until Earth and Mars are
back in the necessary alignment.
“We’re a museum piece if
we don’t launch by the 31st,”
said Curtis eleven, launch op
erations manager.
cation
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for
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