Good News At a Price

A study finds that AIDS drugs can help poor kids--but was it ethical?

Nobody is saying the scientists who presented their findings at the big retrovirus conference in Chicago last week had anything but the noblest of intentions. Their target was HIV, the AIDS virus, and their focus was on its smallest victims: babies born to infected mothers. Doctors knew that months of intravenous drug treatment during pregnancy can keep HIV from passing from mother to child, but the $1,000-a-day regimen is out of the question in Third World countries, where basic medical care and even clean drinking water are hard to come by. So the researchers launched a study to see whether babies...

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