Pregnancy and antiviral medication
May 17th, 2008 | by admin |Many women wonder about taking antiviral medication during pregnancy to suppress outbreaks in the third trimester. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved no drug against herpes for this purpose. Nonetheless, acyclovir is used by some physicians to treat women with genital herpes at the end of pregnancy. Small studies suggest that acyclovir taken daily during the last month of pregnancy will prevent recurrences and, therefore, decrease the need for Cesarean sections, but some experts remain concerned about the safety of fetal exposure to the medication.
At the present time, acyclovir’s manufacturer does not recommend its use during pregnancy. On the other hand, the company has tracked the experiences of several hundred women who took the drug during pregnancy, some of them inadvertently, and the evidence to date suggests that acyclovir does not carry increased risk of birth defects or adverse pregnancy outcome. On the strength of this data, the use of daily, suppressive treatment during the last month of pregnancy is becoming increasingly common.
