Here’s why it’s important to read the whole article before you cut and paste it #HIV #AIDS

Yep, I’m back on that “Jesus, will he ever get it right?” kick with JMG and Joe Jervis.  Once again, his cut/paste reflex has prevented him from reading the entire piece he’s misrepresenting.  Here’s his bit:

The HIV medication tenofovir has been linked to kidney damage. Sold under the brand name Viread, tenofovir is one of the three drugs in the daily combo pill Atripla, one of the most-prescribed in the anti-HIV arsenal.

Patients who take one of the most widely prescribed drugs to treat HIV infection increase their risk of kidney damage by up to 34 percent every year they take the medication, according to a study of more than 10,000 HIV-positive veterans. “You’re willing to sacrifice a little bit of long-term kidney damage when it’s keeping you alive in the short-term,” said Dr. Michael Shlipak, chief of general internal medicine at the VA medical center and an author of the study. “But as HIV becomes a longer and longer chronic disease, people may be on these drugs for 20 years, and that risk is really going to add up.

Viread is also part of the two-med daily combo pill Truvada, which some are petitioning the FDA to approve as a daily HIV preventive. The controversial AIDS Healthcare Foundation has loudly protested using existing HIV medications as a pre-exposure preventive, citing fears that have apparently been proven by the above-linked study.

EXCEPT that this study shows the possibility for damage in HIV positive patients ONLY.  The AHF’s squawking protest has been around Truvada being used as PrEP – as in a preventative dosage against HIV infection – a fact he didn’t even bother to check in his own linked piece.  Here’s the truth that he missed from the SFGate piece that he didn’t scroll down far enough to see:

No one is recommending that patients stop taking tenofovir and other antiretroviral drugs or that doctors should not prescribe it. Shlipak and other HIV/AIDS experts noted that those medications have been remarkably successful in treating HIV. In the United States, many patients are living years and even decades with their infection in check.

And here’s more:

Researchers who have been looking at tenofovir to prevent HIV infection note that studies so far have shown very little increased risk of kidney damage in people who are otherwise healthy.

The most recent prevention study, involving 2,500 men who did not have HIV, was led by scientists at UCSF and the Gladstone Institutes. Only a handful of participants showed signs of kidney damage, and in all of their cases those signs went away once the drug was stopped.

And the final straw (bolding mine)

The VA study, which was published online in the journal AIDS, involved 10,841 HIV-infected men and women who started antiretroviral therapy from 1997 to 2007; 4,303 of those patients took tenofovir at some point.

Researchers looked at three symptoms of kidney damage – protein in the urine, rapid decline in kidney function and chronic kidney disease – and compared patients who had never taken tenofovir with those who had.

They found that among those who took the drug, the risk of developing one of those signs of kidney damage increased by 11 to 34 percent each year, and their risk remained elevated even after they stopped taking it.

Even with that increased risk, the overall chance of long-term kidney damage was fairly low. For example, participants who took tenofovir had a 2 percent risk of developing chronic kidney disease after one year on the drug, compared with 1 percent for those who didn’t.

There’s a world of difference between risk of damage and actual damage.  Had Jervis not been so quick to move on to the next article he was about to recycle and had actually read this one he’d have posted a truthful piece instead of misrepresenting it entirely.

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