Free herpes care ‘costly’

Press, 4 May 1984, Page 4

Free herpes care ‘costly’

Free treatment for genital herpes would be an enormous and as yet unwarranted cost on New Zealand taxpayers, says the head of the Christchurch sexually transmitted diseases clinic, Dr William Platts.

An Auckland Hospital virologist, Dr Paul Goldwater, had commented about a new drug used to alleviate herpes symptoms which he said should be freely available on prescription.

Unless patients are treated at the hospital’s S.T.D. clinic, they must pay $90.14 for 24 tablets or $49.27 for a lOg tube of cream of the drug, acyclovir.

Dr Platts said putting the drug on the free prescription list would be an enormous cost to the taxpayer, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars. Its effects were not well enough proven.

“Everybody that has an attack goes and grabs the

stuff but I do not think it is a solution to the problem until, as I am sure will happen, some more effective compound is found. “I do not think the ointment has proved to be beneficial enough certainly to be on the fund,” he said.

Dr Platts said, however, that a person suffering from severe attacks of herpes would probably be able to get the drug through the hospital system without charge. Acyclovir was used intravenously in hospital cases where the patient had a herpes infection in the bloodstream, but Dr Platts said that he had used the drug in only two cases during the last six months, where the patients had had a severe first attack.

The drug, marketed under the name Zovirax, reduced the length of a first attack of genital herpes but its effect in subsequent attacks had not be proven, he said.