Dr. Annette SohnIn an article in HealthDay News, Dr. Annette Sohn, Director of TREAT Asia, comments on a New England Journal of Medicine Perspective piece on the emerging threat of HIV drug resistance. In the journal’s October 26, 2017, issue, the authors, Dr. Chris Beyrer and Dr. Anton Pozniak, draw attention to the worrying global rise in HIV drug resistance, particularly in infants and children.
Dr. Sohn tells Healthday that she “agrees with the author’s [Beyrer’s] concerns around the current trends in resistance and their characterization of these as alarming.”
“The proposed cuts to global HIV programs are of primary concern in this regard,” she says. “Instead of cutting federal funding for HIV research, we need more support for implementation research to study how to optimally deliver testing and treatment services in cost-effective ways.”
In both the Perspective piece and the Healthday article, Dr. Beyrer discusses the need for greater access to newer antiretroviral drugs such as dolutegravir, or DTG, which have higher barriers to resistance. TREAT Asia is also encouraging greater use of DTG, and has prepared both an informational Treatment Snapshot and a Clinical Brief about the drug. The Clinical Brief will be distributed in multiple languages.
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