Nevirapine results expected in July
The research is looking primarily at the use of Nevirapine in preventing the transmission of HIV from the mother to the child during birth.
According to health minister Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang an earlier trial conducted in Uganda in collaboration with United States revealed that Nevirapine was safer, less expensive and more practical than AZT “or any other drug tested so far in preventing mother to child transmission”.
In the Uganda trial, Nevirapine was given to 310 mothers once during labour and delivery and the babies were given one dose within three days of being born.
The cost of Nevirapine is about R30 per mother and child.
McIntyre said the Chris Hani Baragwanath babies would be followed for up to six weeks before they are tested for HIV.
He said the plan had always been to present the results “at the earliest” at the Durban conference.
He said the research unit has promised to present the results in confidence to government as soon as possible, but he did not think it would be before June.
“If we have something before the Durban 2000 AIDS conference, we will do a confidential briefing, so that government are not caught off guard,” McIntyre said.
The minister said studies seemed to indicate that the development of resistance to Nivirapine was faster than to AZT, but that with a short course, one dose of Nivirapine, it was highly unlikely that resistance would develop.
Tshabalala-Msimang has also expressed concern around the toxic effects of Nevirapine in babies that is doubled because they get their own dose of the drug, plus a dose from the mothers during labour and delivery.
McIntyre confirmed that they were planning some resistance work on Nevirapine.
Celicia Serenata, deputy director of the HIV/AIDS directorate said they had been receiving regular updates on the Nevirapine trials.
She said they were expecting a briefing on preliminary results prior to the Durban conference.
Author
Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Nevirapine results expected in July
by Anso Thom, Health-e News
March 10, 2000