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How many times have you started to have a conversation with someone about Hepatitis C only to have it blow up in your face? Have you ever heard someone say something about Hep C that didn't seem quite right to you? You were probably right something was amiss. A discussion about Hepatitis C can...
As per Wikipedia, the definition of a stigma is as follows: "Stigma is a word that originally means a "sign", "point", or "branding mark"." Wikipedia goes on to call stigma "A badge of shame, a physical mark of infamy or disgrace." Damn that w...
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Buyer Beware! There are several snake oil salesmen out there who are claiming to have cured their own Hepatitis C with herbs, supplements and parking lot gravel. Okay, maybe not the parking lot gravel but it might as well be. What you need to remember is that there are two different types of...
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A decision by the D.C. Department of Health to terminate its contract with a local pharmacy chain that has administered the city’s AIDS Drug Assistance Program, or ADAP, could prevent patients who rely on the program from refilling their prescriptions after July 1.
A representative of at least 15 D.C. pharmacies dispensing prescription drugs for low income people with HIV and AIDS and the director of the city’s Department of Health gave conflicting views this week on whether patients’ ability to refill their prescriptions for life-saving AIDS drugs will be disrupted beginning July 1.
A decision by DOH to terminate its contract with the local pharmacy chain Care Pharmacies that has administered the city’s AIDS Drug Assistance Program, or ADAP, was expected to prompt an as yet undetermined number of pharmacies to discontinue serving ADAP patients, potentially preventing the patients from obtaining the drugs when their current prescriptions run out, according to pharmacist Michael Kim, owner of Grubbs Pharmacy.
“This is going to be an absolute disaster,” said pharmacist Tamara Foreman, a member of the D.C. Board of Pharmacies, an independent entity that advises the city on pharmacy related matters.
“The patients are not being notified,” said Foreman, who also serves on the board of a non-profit organization that advocates on behalf of pharmacy patients. “They are being told to anticipate a gap in service, but they’re not being told where to go if their pharmacy stops filling their prescription.”
Dr. Mohammad Akhter, director of the DOH, and Dr. Gregory Pappas, director of DOH’s HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, Sexually Transmitted Disease, and Tuberculosis Administration (HAHSTA), strongly dispute that assessment. Both told the Blade that no ADAP patients will be adversely impacted by the pharmacy related changes DOH is putting in place.
“We are providing the patients with a 60-day supply of drugs during the transition period,” Akhter told the Blade on Wednesday at a news conference on the release of the city’s 2011 Annual Report on its efforts to combat HIV/AIDS.
“I can tell you that no patients will be harmed in any way,” said Akhter.
He said DOH recently decided to postpone for one month the implementation of the revamped ADAP pharmacy program.
But he and Pappas declined to disclose how many pharmacies involved in the existing ADAP program operated by Care Pharmacies and how many others have opted to join the revised program to be operated directly by DOH.
Some AIDS activists, including Patricia Hawkins, a former Whitman-Walker Health official and member of the D.C.-area HIV Planning Council, have expressed concern that patients’ ability to refill their ADAP prescriptions could be jeopardized if too few pharmacies agree to be part of the new DOH pharmacy network.
Kim said Grubbs planned to stop serving ADAP patients beginning July 1, when the new city-administered program was originally scheduled to go into effect. Kim couldn’t be immediately reached to determine whether Grubbs would continue filling ADAP prescriptions for another month following DOH’s decision to postpone the new program.
Kim indicated in an earlier interview that DOH might postpone implementation of the new program, but said DOH had not informed Care Pharmacies that it planned to do so.
He and others familiar with the ADAP program said they were told by the city that a list of the participating pharmacies in the new program would be released on June 15.
The city didn’t release such a list on that date, prompting pharmacists and activists to fear that too few pharmacies would join the new system to adequately serve ADAP patients in need of prescriptions.
Kim said Grubbs, which is believed to have processed the largest number of ADAP prescriptions in D.C. over the past decade, isn’t signing up for the city’s revamped program because the DOH has cut in half its reimbursement payment for ADAP drug prescriptions and plans to keep the lower payment in place for the next five years.
He said the lower payment makes it too costly for Grubb and other pharmacies to process ADAP prescriptions. He acknowledged that Care Pharmacies currently collects the reimbursement for the prescriptions from the city, takes a cut to cover its own administrative costs and disburses the remaining amount of about $7 per prescription to the other pharmacies in the current program. The city was expected to dispense the reimbursement directly to each pharmacy under the new system.
ADAP, a joint federal-state program, was created under the Ryan White AIDS Care Act in the early 1990s as a means of providing life-saving AIDS drugs to low-income patients as well as symptom-free people with HIV who don’t have private health insurance coverage and can’t afford to pay for the drugs.
Many of the HIV medications, such as anti-retroviral drugs, cost between $1,000 to as much as $2,000 for a one-month prescription, AIDS advocacy groups familiar with ADAP have said.
Please sign the ATC Salvage Therapy Petition Join us in asking Congressman Alcee Hastings and Congresswomen Maxine Waters to send a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter to Anthony Fauci, Director of NIAID, asking for the federal facilitation of apricitabine (ATC). ATC is a phase III nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NRTI) that has been shown to be safe and effective in treating people with HIV. It works against viruses that are resistant to several other nukes and could ...
Researchers from Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, the University of Mississippi Medical Center and the University of Massachusetts Medical School announced today at CROI2013 the discovery of the first infant functionally cured of HIV. The baby, a female now two and a half years old, received 3 HIV medications when brought to the hospital at 30 hours old. Viral load tests were performed during the first few weeks that showed a rapidly decreasing viral load which reached ...
At the 19th International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2012) in Washington D.C., the CDC reported that only 1 out of 4 HIV patients in the U.S. have HIV under control, which is defined as complete viral suppression. Warning bells should be ringing in the scientific and HIV advocacy communities. While much progress has been made in the last three decades in the treatment of HIV, tens of thousands of people living with HIV (PLWH) are currently struggling to construct viable treat...
Paige Rawl is 17 and HIV positive, but while her life has been shaped by HIV it isn't ruled by it. When Paige Rawl starts her senior year at Indianapolis’s Herron High School next month, she'll be cheer captain and a member of the student government and prom committee. This summer, the 17-year-old held down a part-time job at Hollister, hawking the popular Southern California-inspired clothing brand. The all-American girl — who happens to be HIV positive. Paige was in...
The HIV community has been abuzz with the August FDA approval of what had been termed “the Quad”, the second one-pill-once-a-day combination antiretroviral drug. Marketed by Gilead under the name Stribild, the drug contains two NRTIs (tenofovir and emtricitabine), an integrase inhibitor (elvitegravir) and an integrase booster (cobicistat) and is approved for use in treatment naïve patients with either drug resistant or wild type virus. In comparison to Atripla, the first...
Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (NYSE: BMY) today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a supplemental new drug application (sNDA) for SUSTIVA® (efavirenz), including dosing recommendations for...
California and other states would be pressured to amend or repeal criminal laws that single out HIV-positive people under a bipartisan bill co-authored and introduced this week by Rep. Barbara...
Mission Statement
At HIV Haven we wish to provide our readers with vital cutting edge information to help expand HIV knowledge and promote activism, particularly that which works towards an end to the HIV pandemic. It is our desire to bring to you the scientific, medical and social advances that given the appropriate attention and support, could change the course of the HIV pandemic, lessen the devastating effects of HIV and AIDS, better the quality and quantity of life for people living with HIV and even yield an eventual end to the HIV pandemic. We also provide the basics of HIV transmission and treatment.
We will focus on issues such as innovative drug development, strategic activist campaigns, HIV relationships and novel HIV and HIV cure research. We also will bring you advances in Hepatitis C (HCV), a common HIV co-infection. Whether you are living with HIV/AIDS, HIV and HCV, love someone who is, are an activist, advocate, researcher, physician or just an interested party, we hope here at HIV Haven we can help you find what you are looking for.
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