"U.S. knew about dangers of AIDS medicine"

U.S. knew about dangers of AIDS medicine destined for Africa, but proceeded anyway

Weeks before President Bush announced a plan to protect African babies from AIDS, top U.S. health officials were warned that research on the key drug was flawed and may have underreported thousands of severe reactions, including deaths, government documents show.

The 2002 warnings about the drug, nevirapine, were serious enough to suspend testing for more than a year, let Uganda's government know of the dangers and prompt the drug's maker to pull its request for permission to use the medicine to protect newborns in the United States.

But the National Institutes of Health, the government's premier health research agency, chose not to inform the White House as it scrambled to keep its experts' concerns from scuttling the use of nevirapine in Africa as a cheap solution, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press.

Full Article : newstarget.com