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medpundit |
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Saturday, May 11, 2002Both are AIDS drugs made by Glaxo, but Combivir costs about $200 more a bottle than Ziagen. The company has investigated and ruled out a bottling error at the factory. It looks like someone intentionally put Ziagen in a Combivir bottle to make some extra money. I suppose that was easier than manufacturing placebo to put in the bottles, and less likely to be detected than putting a really cheap drug in them like aspirin, or maybe they were just crooks with consciences who thought that putting another AIDS drug in the bottles would do no harm. If it was the latter, they were sadly mistaken. Both Combivir and Ziagen are in the same class of AIDS drugs called nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors. They work by inhibiting or decreasing the replication of the AIDS virus in cells. ( For an illustration of the HIV life cycle and how the drugs interrupt it, click here.) Combivir is a combination of two different drugs in this class, zidovudine and lamivudine. Ziagen is the brand name for abacavir. One of the current treatment recommendations for HIV infection is to use Combivir and Ziagen together. If a patient received his real Ziagen as well as the Ziagen masquerading as Combivir, he would in reality be getting twice the dose of Ziagen, and thus be more likely to suffer its adverse effects, which can include death. Combivir is also recommended for treatment of pregnant HIV women and of their infants; Ziagen is not. It’s sad to see criminals branching out into the pharmaceutical industry this way. Why can’t they just content themselves with diet scams and insurance fraud? posted by Sydney on 5/11/2002 10:04:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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