Virtual Monotherapy is good or bad for AIDS Patients ?

Virtual monotherapy is one of the most controversial topics on AIDS at present online. Just put in the word online and you are guaranteed several thousand sites that are all talking about virtual monotherapy and how it can be good or bad for you depending on several reasons.

Good for you?
Until a few years before, all AIDS drugs were available only through clinical trial programs. As a result, users were started on one drug and then as newer drugs became available; more and more drugs were added to the patient’s drug regime. This was the only way that drug companies could test new drugs that came in to the market. It also allowed drug companies an early idea of the side effects of the drugs and whether the drug was feasible for human production. It also allowed patients to try out newer drugs that would never have been available for several years. This type of sequentially adding one by one drug did not benefit the patients in the long run.

Virtual monotherapy where drugs were added sequentially to the patient’s regime are now contraindicated as it creates resistance to nearly every drug used to fight HIV. But at the same time this raises serious questions on how it can be possible to test new drugs. Clinical trials run on volunteers who are already using a preset regime of drugs.

Even though rapid access to the drugs was ideal due to a humanitarian point of view; it still creates a gene pool of resistant patients who burn through all new formulations as soon as they are made! Researchers have already stated that the early test patients who were used to test drugs released in the1990s are now already resistant to the 20 plus group of approved HIV drugs.

This is definitely not good for the patients. But many patients are willing to risk this in the hope that the new creations can protect them from a runaway HIV.

At present, there are several people who debating the need to supply the medication to the sick and dying versus the need to ensure that a medication- resistance group does not develop.