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| Research News |
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| Sunday, May 10, 2009 |
A Custom Drug
(
New York Times Op-ed, May 10, 2009 By Ruth Faden, Anne Drapkin Lyerly and Maggie Little )
(
New York Times Op-ed, May 10, 2009 By Ruth Faden, Anne Drapkin Lyerly and Maggie Little )
When diseases like swine flu hit, pregnant women are especially at risk. And yet we know surprisingly little about how to treat them. In its guidelines for the antiviral drugs Tamiflu and Relenza, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that pregnant women infected or at high risk for infection should take the recommended adult dosage: "Pregnancy should not be considered a contraindication" to taking the drugs, because the benefits of treatment "likely outweigh the theoretical risks of antiviral use." But we don’t know whether this is true. Concerns about the ethics of performing drug studies on pregnant women mean we know far less about how to treat them. It is perfectly possible that the standard adult dose of antivirals will not work in the pregnant body.... (
continued
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Ruth Faden is the director of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins; Anne Drapkin Lyerly is an obstetrician-gynecologist at Duke University Hospital; and Maggie Little is a senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown
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