THERE’S no need to panic yet. But there are signs that HIV is fighting back against some of the main drugs now used to combat it, with resistant strains responsible for more than a fifth of new infections in the US.
At a meeting in Washington DC last week, it was reported that of 317 HIV-positive people who had had no previous treatment, 23 per cent failed to respond fully to one or more antiviral drugs. The biggest problems were with relatively new antiviral drugs called non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs), which block an enzyme vital for viral replication.
“The biggest problems were with relatively…
