FOR HIV-positive women in poor countries it can be a life-saving short cut: a one-off treatment with the anti-retroviral drug nevirapine in late pregnancy can stop their babies being infected with HIV during birth. Now it seems there is a major downside.
Previous studies had suggested that any nevirapine-resistant HIV arising as a result of the treatment disappeared from the mother鈥檚 body shortly after birth. However, when Sarah Palmer and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health in Frederick, Maryland, looked more carefully for specific nevirapine-resistance mutations in HIV from women given the treatment in Soweto, South Africa, they found more than a fifth had some drug-resistant HIV a year later.
This means that if a woman takes nevirapine again, whether to treat her own disease or protect a subsequent child, it may not work. Such drug failures may already be happening in women treated years earlier, says Palmer.
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Ideally women should get full-time therapy with several drugs, to stop the virus becoming resistant to any one drug. 鈥淏ut if a single dose is the only option, what can you do?鈥� asks Palmer.
