Resistance to antiviral agents: balancing good and evil

Abstract

Antiviral agents have been difficult to find and we still have only a handful that meet the safety and effectiveness we have come to expect from antibacterial agents. Some, because of these limitations, are reserved for serious conditions such as HIV, hepatitis B (HBV), hepatitis C and CMV in immunocompromised patients. The widespread use of antivirals has been a phenomenon of the last one to two decades, following on from the development of the nucleoside analogues for herpes viruses. Not unexpectedly, it is only in the very recent past that we have had to confront the problems of resistance of viruses to antiviral agents, though this already poses significant management problems for some conditions.