Study: Africans take AIDS drugs reliably
Contradicting the perception that AIDS drug regimens are too complicated to be effective in Africa, an international study has found that sub-Saharan Africans are better at taking their drugs than North Americans.
The study, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that 77 percent of sub-Saharan AIDS patients took their drugs correctly compared to 55 percent of North Americans.
“The myth of poor adherence in Africa, previously used as a rationale to delay or deny the expansion of treatment programs … has firmly been debunked by this study,” said Ann-Louise Colgan of Africa Action, a Washington, D.C.-based organization focused on African issues.
Edward Mills, executive director of the Centre for International Health and Human Rights Studies in Toronto and lead author of the study, said the findings should help end the practice in which patients in Africa are sometimes forced to “prove themselves capable” of following their doctors’ orders.
Compliance is critical for antiretroviral therapy, which typically involves two pills a day in Africa, because not taking the medications correctly can lead to patients developing resistance to the drugs, rendering them ineffective.
Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 10 percent of the world’s population but 79 percent of AIDS deaths. In 2005, an estimated 2.5 million people in the region became newly infected with HIV and 2 million died, according to UNAIDS.
One example of the perception that antiretroviral drug regimens were too complicated to be effective in Africa was a comment in 2001 from the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development that African patients couldn’t stick with the treatment because they didn’t “know what Western time is.”
Since 2003, the U.S. has undertaken a significant increase in funding for global AIDS programs through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which has pledged $15 billion over five years for prevention, treatment and care.
This year, the U.S. plans to spend $3.2 billion on the global AIDS fight, with $868 million specifically targeted to support antiretroviral treatment in 15 focus countries, 13 of which are in sub-Saharan Africa.
The study analyzed data from 31 previous studies involving 17,573 North American patients and 27 studies of a total of 12,116 sub-Saharan patients.