1 minute read
Last Week in the World of News
by Mildred Metz staff writer
0 4/8
Advertisement
New AIDS drug approved by FDA.
The drug delavirdine from Pharmacia & Upjohn was approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a new AIDS drug. This drug should be in pharmacies within a month with the brand name Rescriptor. Delavirdine-is a member of a class of drugs called non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors. It can be used with other medicines, but never alone in treating AIDS patients and those who were recently diagnosed with being HIV positive. There was a delay in the approval during the month of November because of conflicting data. Studies have shown that this drug killed twice as much of the HIV virus than AZT during early stages, but it only lasted 12 weeks for those who had been ill for a long time.
The main side effect of delavirdine is a skin rash. The wholesale price will be $2,250 for a year's supply.
0 4/9
Government offers apology.
An apology on behalf of the federal government will be presented by President Clinton about a medical experiment in which hundreds of black men were denied treatment for syphilis for as long as 40 years.
The United States Public Health Service did not supply treatment for 399 men from 1932 to 1972 to study how syphilis spread and how to kill it. Those who had syphilis were not informed they had the disease. They were denied penicillin after it was declared as a treatment for syphilis in 1947.
The federal government has paid $10 million to victims and their heirs, which totals more than 6,000 people.
0 4/10
U.N. hopes to end genital mutilation.
The United Nations has filed for international support for a campaign to end the tradition of female genital mutilation which is practiced in Africa and parts of the Middle East.
About 130 million women and girls around the world have been forced to receive such mutilation and two million more were added each year.
The _United Nations Population Fund Unicef will join a health organization in a program which will provide teams for the governments to help enforce national policies to halt the practice.
This mutilation is an opera-
