Dec 12, 2003  |  By: JOE CREA  | COMMENTS     

David Reznik said he cannot imagine what it would be like to lose a second partner to AIDS. Having lost his first partner, Eric White, in 1994, Reznik, chief of Dental Services at Grady Health System in Atlanta, remembers all too well the painful trial of the tragedy.

“When AZT failed, he became paralyzed on the left side of his body as a result of brain cancer,” Reznik said. “He also had trouble with his vision. He was an artist and because of the disease, he could no longer be that. Dealing with it was awful the first time around and I don’t know how I would react to losing another partner.”

But now Reznik is facing just such a possibility. His current partner of eight years, Hugh, who has been HIV positive since the early 1990s, is resistant to all existing HIV drugs.

“Our family is out of options,” Reznik said.

New strains of HIV, resistant to all of the commonly prescribed HIV drugs, are growing. There are hundreds of documented cases in the United Kingdom of patients who do not respond to existing HIV drugs, according to figures from Britain’s Health Protection Agency. In 2001, 154 people were told they were resistant to the three available classes of drugs. In 2000, it was 115.

There are no current figures for the United States suggesting an increase of resistance to HIV medicines. But AIDS activists and officials say it is a problem that will grow, especially in light of recent Centers for Disease Control & Prevention figures showing HIV infections in the United States are climbing.

The likelihood of increased resistance to HIV drugs underscores the need for pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs while also providing access to existing drugs, officials say.

Abner Mason, executive director of the AIDS Responsibility Project and member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA), said one way to provide for such research is to provide drug manufacturers with incentives by strengthening intellectual property rights and patent protection for pharmaceutical companies.

“Intellectual property rights and patent protection are really essential to the fight against HIV because the only tool we have to really save lives are the drugs,” Mason said. “The drugs we currently have will only work for a certain period of time because of resistance. And the only thing that produces new drugs is incentives.”

Recognizing the growing drug-resistance problem, PACHA unanimously passed a Trade Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS) Resolution in August asking President Bush and Tommy Thompson, secretary of Health & Human Services, to support strong intellectual property rights policies and other financial incentive issues for pharmaceutical companies. They hope the move will encourage companies to invest in new research.

While recent figures from the Pharmaceutical Research Manufacturers Association (PhRMA) show that 83 drugs or vaccines are currently being developed, AIDS drugs development has fallen by nearly 30 percent in the past five years, according to Roger Bate, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In a recent column, Bate criticized groups like Act Up and Doctors Without Borders for attacking “corporate greed” which has resulted in companies escaping “the no-profit zone that AIDS research has become.”

“These groups take a very hostile position because they see people around them dying who can be saved,” Bate said. “While they were very instrumental, and wisely so, in putting enough pressure on the drug companies to lower their prices they have gone beyond that and essentially want the companies to give drugs away for free.”

Mark Grayson, vice president of communications for the Pharmaceutical Research Manufacturers Association said that price controls take away the incentives for companies to develop new drugs.

“Companies need to have reasonable returns on their investment and unfortunately, people need incentives,” Grayson said. “It’s difficult to come up with new medicines without them. And to come up with new medicines, someone has to take the risks. It’s not easy building a factory, especially for AIDS drugs. Those things are extraordinarily expensive. So, some will say, ‘Well, we’ll get generic drugs instead,’ and I say, ‘Have you ever seen a generic manufacturer make protease inhibitors?’”

Dr. Arthur Leonard Caplan, chair of the medical ethics department at the University of Pennsylvania, said that companies have not escaped the “no-profit zone” and added that “attacks in the name of the impoverished are not attacks, they are demands.”

Mason criticized the practice of selling drugs at unreasonably low costs adding that it is “a short-term solution to a problem that causes a bigger problem in the long-term.”

“Some say, ‘just force the drug companies to charge ...