Dallas Buyers Club & AZT Today

Kaitlyn Solotes

[1] In the 2013 film Dallas Buyers Club, a hot headed and impatient cowboy is diagnosed with HIV. After a destructive stage of denial accompanied by drugs and alcohol, Ron Woodroof contracts the AIDS virus. Woodroof goes on to seek treatment, including those not yet on the market. However, the hospital which diagnosed Ron is holding clinical trials for a brand new drug called AZT. In search of AZT, Ron finds himself in Mexico when a doctor directs him to a more effective treatment of vitamins and other medications. I was extremely interested in this topic because 1) Matthew McConaughey is a great actor and 2) I did not know much about the history of AIDS treatments in the United States. [2] It turns out that AZT, also known as Zidovudine or Retrovir, was the first approved drug for treatment of the HIV virus in 1987. Although more than thirty drugs are now available to treat the disease, AZT made a huge and lasting impact on the history of HIV/AIDS management. One unique factor about AZT is that instead of the usual three human trials needed to approve a drug, AZT only underwent one; this shows the desperation that both patients and physicians felt dealing with such an imposing epidemic. The adaptation of AZT in the film is that it is an extremely controversial drug; some doctors today do agree that the drug should be taken under certain circumstances or not at all. [3] The truth about AZT is that it is an antiretroviral drug, more specifically a nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor. What this means is that AZT helps to repress the replication or synthesis of DNA strands, decrease the amount of infection in the blood, and prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus. Overall, the goal of AZT is to stop HIV from multiplying, but it cannot cure HIV/AIDS all together. Sometimes HIV can reproduce imperfect copies of itself and become resistant to the drug treatments; one way to avoid this is by taking more than one medication at a time. By allowing different drugs into your body it is harder for HIV to make copies which may resist drug effectiveness. [4] The controversy that surrounds AZT may lie within the side effects. When first distributed, AZT was given in such large doses that severe side effects frequently occurred. Today AZT is prescribed in much smaller doses and causes less severe side effects such as muscle pain, nausea, dizziness, vomiting, and rashes. I think there are several different methods that can be used to treat HIV and AZT is just one of them that has been proven to save lives when taken as followed with a balanced lifestyle.

[1] Dallas buyers club. Theater viewing. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2014.

[2] "U.S. Food and Drug Administration." U S Food and Drug Administration Home Page. http://www.fda.gov/ (accessed February 26, 2014).

[3] "News." AIDSinfo. http://www.aidsinfo.nih.gov/ (accessed February 26, 2014).

[4] "Side-effects." HIV & AIDS Information ::. http://www.aidsmap.com/Side-effects/page/1283774/ (accessed February 26, 2014).