Thursday, August 30, 2012

The Complex Puzzle Of When to Start HIV Treatment

-cells in the patient's blood drops below a certain number, currently 350  per microlitre. 

In the last year, however, the price of treatment has dropped even further, to about $150 per year. That changes things substantially for poorer countries but money is still scarce so the question remains--who should be treated and when?

Today, Brian Williams and pals at the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis in Stellenbosch reveal the results of their analysis of this question. 

"In an ideal world one would simply rank people in order of their predicted life expectancy and then start from those with the shortest life-expectancy and progressively include people with longer and longer life expectancies until the supply of drugs is exhausted," they say.

Of course, in practice, things are more complicated because not all information is available for all HIV infected individuals when a decision has to be made. And in any case, CD4

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