[Letter to Frank Miedema from Jon Cohen]

TO: DR. FRANK MIEDEMA
FROM: JON COHEN
July 28, 1992
Dear Dr. Miedema,
Here is what I have written regarding your work. If there are any
inaccuracies, please let me know as soon as possible--the
magazine wraps everything up this afternoon. If there are no
inaccuracies, please call, too. That way I'll know there's
nothing left hanging.
Thanks for your time.
Since ely,
Jon Cohen
3445 17th St. NW
Washington, DC 20010
202-332-9564 or 202-387-7517
AZT may only work for people who have less pathogenic HIV
strains. It's been known for years that some strains of HIV cause
white blood cells to form syncytia--clumps of fused white cells
that quickly die. But data released in Amsterdam revealed that
only people infected with strains that don't form syncytia--and
are presumably less pathogenic--respond to AZT.
Frank Miedema of the Central Laboratory of the Netherlands Red
Cross Blood Transfusion Service recently completed a 2-year,
double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial of AZT in 52 HIVpositive asymptomatic people. None of the 20 people who were
infected with nonsyncytia-inducing HIV and took AZT developed
full-blown AIDS--compared with six from 18 in the no-drug control
group. Only 12 of Miedema's subjects had syncytia-inducing HIV,
too few for him to do reliable statistics. In a separate study,
Burroughs Wellcome, AZT's manufacturer, looked at these people
and found that, indeed, the drug didn't help them. The Burroughs
study matched 17 HIV-positive patients who had taken AZT for 3
years without progressing to AIDS with another 17 who had,
despite also taking the drug. In all but one of the pairs, the
progressor was infected with a strain that induces syncytia and
the non-progressor with one that doesn't.
San Francisco General Hospital's Paul Volberding, who's head of
the International AIDS society and has been treating AIDS