Treatment urged

People living with HIV are being encouraged to make the most of current drug options available, to avoid a future influx in the numbers of people requiring drugs through the compassionate access scheme, a long-established program which provides early access to drugs for patients with multiple resistance.

The National Association of People Living with HIV treatments spokesperson Bill Whittaker wants people currently on treatments or who have been recently diagnosed to take full advantage of the recent spate of drug releases.

Precautions taken now could not only benefit patients in the future, but could also avoid placing unnecessary pressure on Australia’s compassionate access scheme in the future, he said.

We’ve got a lot of new drugs at the moment, but these things tend to ebb and flow so people need to take the opportunity to use them wisely, which means getting a competent doctor to work with you to choose the drugs, Whittaker told Sydney Star Observer.

Secondly, people out there who have not been tested or who have been but are not in contact with the medical system, should think about getting on those drugs now before their disease progresses too far.

In the absence of any new drugs, the numbers of people needing compassionate access will probably go up in the future. I don’t think they would ever go back up to the levels we saw in the 90s, but there is a foreseeable rise.

In the 90s when the drug 3TC was developed, there were 1,500 people on the Australian compassionate access scheme. In recent years, those numbers have dropped to as few as 10 or 20 people a year.

Keeping those numbers as low as possible is important though, because while Australia has a world-class record of receiving early access to drugs, there are no guarantees as to how quickly new drugs can be made available.

We negotiate these programs for each and every drug. It’s a major part of what we do, Whittaker said.

But it can sometimes involve some very difficult conversations, because what drug companies want to give out and what we need don’t automatically align with each other.