IT HAS been used for decades to treat minor infections, and a year’s treatment costs as little as $7. But the standard antibiotic cotrimoxazole last week earned a new and heroic role in the fight against childhood AIDS in Africa, preventing potentially lethal respiratory infections that strike HIV-positive children with weakened immunity.
Last week’s study in The Lancet (vol 364, p 1865) showed that when given regularly for 19 months to HIV-positive children aged from 1 to 14, the drug almost halved their risk of dying from secondary infections compared with children receiving a placebo. Some 42 per cent of the placebo-treated children died, compared with…
