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AIDS case decline comes to end in U.S.

Published 9:00 pm Monday, August 13, 2001

The Washington Post

AND THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON — The dramatic drop in recent years in the number of Americans developing AIDS and dying from the disease appears to be coming to an end, federal health officials announced Monday.

After declining sharply in the mid-1990s, the number of U.S. AIDS cases and deaths reported each quarter remained stable between mid-1998 and mid-2000, according to new government figures released at a national conference on prevention of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS.

The findings, released at a national HIV prevention conference here, bolster a concern expressed by health officials who marked AIDS’ 20th anniversary earlier this year: Many Americans, numbed by news of effective AIDS drugs, have become complacent about the disease.

In other health news Monday:

  • The government has approved the first new therapy in over a decade to help hospital patients with congestive heart failure who are gasping for breath, something that happens to about a million Americans a year.

    The drug Natrecor is a genetically engineered version of the hormone these patients’ hearts churn out naturally to ease their breathing. The idea: Give them more of that hormone, and they’ll improve without having to try riskier medications.

    But it does carry one serious risk — blood pressure that drops dangerously low, warned Dr. Douglas Throckmorton, the Food and Drug Administration’s deputy director of cardiorenal drugs.

  • A young British woman with the human form of mad cow disease, and an older American with the more common form of the malady, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, have been treated at a San Francisco hospital with older drugs that doctors hope will alleviate the symptoms of the fatal brain disease.

    Quinacrine, widely used during World War II to treat malaria, and chlorpromazine, which has been used for decades to treat schizophrenia, appear to be effective against all forms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

    "It is way too early to make any claims that the drug is working," said Dr. Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. "One person has gotten worse and about the other we just don’t know. We are far from a cure."

    But over the weekend, the father of one patient, 20-year-old Rachel Forber from Merseyside in northern England, told a London tabloid that after 19 days of treatment his daughter was able to walk unaided, use a knife and fork and complete coordination tests that she had previously found impossible. The tabloid reported that Forber was given the diagnosis in June and told she had a year to live, and that she had become disabled and needed a wheelchair.

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