By Navdip Dhariwal
BBC News, Cape Town
Scientists say the largest HIV/Aids clinical trial ever done in Africa should make it easier and cheaper to get life-saving medicines to villages.
The results of the Dart clinical trial are to be announced at an international conference in South Africa.
They show that expensive routine lab tests, part of normal treatment, have only a small benefit because they do little to extend survival rates.
Without the testing, patients would not need to travel to clinics in cities.
The tests are very hard to carry out in most of Africa, the research suggests.
Despite promises of universal treatment for HIV/Aids, only a third of the six million Africans who need treatment are getting it and there are concerns that money for Aids programmes is running short.
There is still no cure for HIV/Aids, but anti-retroviral drugs can stop the disease from developing.
The difficulty for rural Africa is that normal Aids treatment requires patients to undergo regular laboratory tests to check for side-effects and make sure the medicines are working.
These test are expensive and require sophisticated laboratories that are often only available in cities – many hours’ drive away from the villages where people live.
Three countries
Now the results of Africa’s largest ever HIV/Aids clinical trial, called the Dart trial, show the regular tests which patients undergo have either no benefit or very little benefit.
Scientists in Uganda, Zimbabwe and Britain followed almost 3,500 patients over six years.
If regular laboratory tests are not needed, doctors say it will be much easier and cheaper to give treatment in village clinics – rather than making patients travel to centres with laboratories.
Practitioners say with trained healthcare workers they can provide close supervision and support, and give HIV treatment to many more patients close to where they live.
And for many in rural Africa this is the only way of getting treatment for a disease that has spread rapidly across the continent.</p
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Mark Vann