The Impatient Dr. Lange by Seema Yasmin

Author:Seema Yasmin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2018-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

6 Trials

Once upon a time a heretical priest and a pair of young lovers were trapped in an authoritarian state. Baltasar, a wounded soldier was besotted with Blimunda, a peasant girl with mystical powers. The priest was an aviation pioneer. He built a flying machine, a bizarre contraption of metal plates, ropes, and cranes, to escape the Spanish Inquisition. But as the trio planned their liberation, Blimunda hesitated. Eyeing the rig, she asked the priest: How will the Passarola fly? The priest had studied in Holland, where he learned of a novel energy source. Human conviction will act as fuel, he told Blimunda. How can freedom be won without it?

Joep put down the novel and sipped his Heineken. These days he found himself drawn to José Saramago’s fantastical tales. The Portuguese author was a breaker of rules, a defender of love, and he knew a thing or two about plagues and the powerless. In his books, society dissolved when diseases spread and thousands suffered under the rule of gods and monarchs who cared little about the poor. José knew about being an outsider, too. The writer was fired from his job as a journalist and exiled from Portugal, accused of being a blasphemer, a communist, and an anarchist.

Joep wondered if he had exiled himself. He left the World Health Organization on the cusp of a breakthrough. Two new classes of HIV drugs were about to be approved, meaning HIV could now be ambushed from three different angles. Finally, there was a chance that science could conquer the virus.

He had been saying it for years, since 1988 in fact: HIV was a wily foe, and it should be treated the same way tuberculosis had been managed since the 1950s—with a cocktail of potent medicines, not just one.

So it was interesting to see in 1996, the year after Joep left the WHO, Dr. David Ho’s bespectacled face gracing the cover of Time magazine. The American AIDS researcher was celebrated as the magazine’s Man of the Year for his “championing” of combination therapy.

But Joep had bigger problems than being overlooked for a magazine award. Many scientists hadn’t listened to Joep when he suggested they wait for combination therapy. They had jumped on AZT. Patients from Amsterdam to Anacostia were fed the pills alone or in combination with drugs that attacked HIV the same way as AZT. That strategy turned out to be a disaster. Not only was it useless, it was dangerous.

When patients were given AZT on its own or with one other pill, they perked up for a while, maybe for a few months, maybe even a year, and then they fell sick again. The drugs stopped working. In the presence of a few, weak drugs, HIV fought back with a vengeance and grew stronger.

Worse still, a person infected with a strain of HIV that was resistant to AZT could find the entire class of reverse transcriptase inhibitor drugs was useless. They might even be resistant to medicines they had never taken.

A

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.