NEWS: Drug companies may settle AIDS lawsuit - Implanting ear tubes studies have produced inconsistent results.

September 8, 2006

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Drug companies may settle AIDS lawsuit

PRETORIA, South Africa -- Pharmaceutical giants entered settlement talks with the government Wednesday, a sign they are dropping their fight against a law that could provide cheap copies of AIDS drugs to millions of South Africans. The suit, postponed until Thursday as the discussions continued, has deeply embarrassed the drug companies since it began six weeks ago. Many have responded by drastically cutting prices on their own.

However, human rights groups say those prices would fall even further in the face of generic competition.

International human rights groups and AIDS activists have waged a global public relations offensive against the suit, which they see as an obstacle to securing medication for the nearly 26 million people in Africa infected with HIV.

The law could give South Africa the power to import or produce generic versions of patented drugs including expensive antiretroviral drugs needed to treat AIDS. An estimated 4.7 million South Africans are infected with HIV.

Study: Common surgery doesn't aid development

Implanting ear tubes an operation done on hundreds of thousands of toddlers each year does not appear to improve their speech and learning development and may not be worth the risks and the cost, a study suggests. The tiny tubes are inserted in the eardrums to help clear the fluid that can build up in a child's middle ear during infection and to prevent further infections. Because the fluid can cause hearing loss, there is concern that the child's speech, language and other development will suffer if the fluid persists for weeks or months.

But whether that hearing loss actually harms development is not certain; previous studies have produced inconsistent results.

In a study in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, researchers in Pittsburgh looked at two groups of toddlers: those who got ear tubes after three months of fluid in their ears the standard guideline and those who waited up to nine months before tubes were inserted. The children were tested for speech, language, learning and behavior when they turned 3.

"The bottom line was there wasn't any difference in the developmental outcomes as best we could measure them at age 3," said Dr. Jack L. Paradise of Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh.

Compiled from Associated Press reports