AIDS/HIV
AIDS group fears annual HIV costs may hit $35 bln
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The International HIV/AIDS Alliance warned on Saturday that the annual cost of tackling the HIV epidemic could balloon to $35 billion by 2030 if governments fail to invest in efficient, targeted and cost-effective prevention measures.
The Alliance said the AIDS virus, which already infects around 33.4 million people across the world, was a “costly time-bomb” for families, governments and donors.
“For every two people who get treatment, five others get infected. At this rate, spending for HIV will rise from $13 billion now to between $19 and $35 billion in just 20 years time,” Alvaro Bermejo, executive director of the Alliance, said in a statement.
Banning all gay men from donating blood is unscientific and wrong, say AIDS research pioneers
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Since 1983, blood agencies in Canada, the United States and many other industrialized nations have disallowed all blood donations from men who have sex with men (MSM.) While a total ban was justified scientifically and ethically in 1983, in 2010 it no longer makes sense, say pioneering AIDS researchers Dr. Mark Wainberg and Dr. Norbert Gilmore in an article to be published May 25 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ.)
Dr. Wainberg heads the HIV research program at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research (LDI) at the Jewish General Hospital and was a co-discoverer of 3TC, one of the first drugs known to control HIV. He also heads the McGill University AIDS Centre, based at the LDI. Dr. Norbert Gilmore is a professor at the McGill Faculty of Medicine and the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, and is a clinician at the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC.)
“The 1983 ban has hung on so long, unfortunately, because many people became infected by HIV in the early 80s through blood transfusions, and they have mounted continuing pressure on the blood agencies to maintain the ban,” says Wainberg. “While we can sympathize with them, this no longer makes sense in 2010, and with each passing year it makes less sense.”
Economic crisis could worsen HIV/AIDS epidemic: UN
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Economic crisis and climate change concerns could affect the fight against the AIDS virus and lead to a “universal nightmare”, the head of the United Nations’ agency for HIV/AIDS said on Sunday.
The global economic downturn has brought about greater inequality and could increase vulnerability and fuel the epidemic, said Michele Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS.
About 33.4 million people worldwide are infected with HIV and the AIDS virus. Since AIDS emerged in the 1980s, almost 60 million people have been infected and 25 million have died.
Possible cure for HIV patients?
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On December 7th, an article was published in PLoS One that explained that researchers from UCLA AIDS Institute have found a way to use human stem cells to fight HIV-infected cells. The human stem cells can be engineered into cells that can target and kill the infected cells.
The researchers explained that they took the CD8 cytotoxic T lymphocytes, which are the cells that help fight infections in the body, from an infected individual and identified the T-cell receptors. The T-cell receptors are the cells that recognize and kill the HIV-infected cells. The receptors do not generate enough to completely destroy the virus but the researchers have found a way to engineer these cells and produce large quantities of the HIV-specific CD8 cells.
The researchers determined that the HIV-specific T cells have to match the individual in order to properly work and destroy the infected cells.
HIV-infected Chinese children struggle with stigma
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The second storey of this nondescript building in Fuyang city in China’s central province of Anhui houses HIV-positive orphans, but unlike many other similar establishments, there are no signboards outside.
Heavy stigma still surrounds the disease in China, and children - probably the most vulnerable group among AIDS patients - are almost invariably barred from schools and even abandoned by their parents and relatives.
Change is occurring, albeit slowly.
President Hu Jintao last year shook hands with AIDS patients to try and reduce some of the stigma. On World AIDS Day - December 1 - this year, he met with AIDS awareness volunteers, and spoke with patients by telephone.
Feelings of Stigmatization May Discourage HIV Patients from Proper Care
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The feeling of stigmatization that people living with HIV often experience doesn’t only exact a psychological toll —new UCLA research suggests it can also lead to quantifiably negative health outcomes.
In a study published in the October issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, researchers from the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA found that a large number of HIV-positive individuals who reported feeling stigmatized also reported poor access to care or suboptimal adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART).
In fact, individuals who experienced high levels of internalized stigma were four times as likely as those who didn’t to report poor access to medical care; they were three times as likely to report suboptimal adherence to HIV medications.
Certain cancers more common among HIV patients than non-HIV patients
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Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found that non-AIDS-defining malignancies such as anal and lung cancer have become more prevalent among HIV-infected patients than non-HIV patients since the introduction of anti-retroviral therapies in the mid-1990s.
AIDS patients with suppressed immune systems are at higher risk for so-called AIDS-defining malignancies – cancers such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Kaposi’s sarcoma and cervical carcinoma. Some researchers have speculated, however, that HIV patients are diagnosed with more non-AIDS-defining malignancies simply because anti-retroviral drugs now used enable them to live longer, but the results of the UT Southwestern study suggest that other factors may be at work.
The researchers, using data from more than 100,000 patient records in the U.S. Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, found that when the statistics were adjusted for gender, race/ethnicity and age, HIV-infected patients were 60 percent more likely to have anal, lung, Hodgkin’s, melanoma or liver cancer than patients without HIV. The rate of prostate cancer was similar between the two groups, according to the report.
Officials: India patent refusals to help treat AIDS
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India’s rejection of patent applications on two life-saving HIV/AIDS drugs last week has been welcomed by health officials, who say it will ensure wider access to the medicines.
India has the world’s third highest caseload, with 2.5 million infections, behind Nigeria and South Africa.
India’s Patent Office rejected applications for leading antiretroviral drug tenofovir, manufactured by U.S. biotechnology group Gilead, and darunavir, which is made by Ireland’s Tibotec Pharmaceuticals, officials said.
50 million women in Asia at risk of HIV infection
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Fifty million women in Asia are at risk of being infected with HIV because of the risky sexual behavior of their husbands or boyfriends, leading health experts said in a report on Tuesday.
More than 90 percent of the 1.7 million women now living with HIV in Asia became infected while being in monogamous, long-term relationships with men who engaged in risky sex behavior, the report launched by UNAIDS said.
These include men who had other sexual partners or who were drug users.
“Go to the doctor? Only if I’m really sick…”
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African American men could be putting their health at risk by avoiding disease screening, in the belief that the results might threaten their masculinity. Because they prove their masculinity through their sexuality and sexual performance, seeking medical advice including HIV/AIDS testing goes against their notion of masculinity. Waverly Duck, a Post Doctoral Associate from the Department of Sociology at Yale University in the US, argues that current leading theories of gender and masculinity and health behavior models are not relevant enough to African American men and their distinctive notion of masculinity. His results are published online in Springer’s Journal of African American Studies.
Duck studied how African American men conceptualize masculinity and how it relates to their health behaviors. Through a combination of focus groups and in-depth interviews, he asked African American men about their own understanding of their gender identity and examined how that identity, as well as how it is achieved and maintained, relates to their health.
Harvard scientists solve mystery about why HIV patients are more susceptible to TB infection
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A team of Harvard scientists has taken an important first step toward the development of new treatments to help people with HIV battle Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) infection. In their report, appearing in the July 2009 print issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology (http://www.jleukbio.org) they describe how HIV interferes with the cellular and molecular mechanisms used by the lungs to fight TB infection. This information is crucial for researchers developing treatments to help people with HIV prevent or recover from TB infection.
“HIV/TB co-infection is a critical global health problem, especially in developing countries,” said Naimish Patel, M.D., lead researcher on the study and Instructor of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. “We hope that these findings will lead to further studies and possible new therapies for treating or preventing tuberculosis in HIV disease.”
Patel and colleagues made their discovery by extracting immune cells called “alveolar macrophages” from the lungs of otherwise healthy, asymptomatic HIV-positive patients as well as from people who did not have HIV. In people who are HIV-positive, the macrophages have a decreased response to the TB bacterium when compared to people who did not have HIV. To learn why, the scientists examined lung specimens from the HIV-positive patients and found increased levels of a molecule called IL-10, which elevated the amount of a protein called “BCL-3” in alveolar macrophages and that reduced their ability to ward off TB infection.
Waking up dormant HIV
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HAART (highly active anti-retroviral therapy) has emerged as an extremely effective HIV treatment that keeps virus levels almost undetectable; however, HAART can never truly eradicate the virus as some HIV always remains dormant in cells. But, a chemical called suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid (SAHA), recently approved as a leukemia drug, has now been shown to ‘turn on’ latent HIV, making it an attractive candidate to weed out the hidden virus that HAART misses.
Matija Peterlin at UCSF and colleagues had previously identified another chemical called HMBA that could activate latent HIV, but the risk of several toxic side effects made HMBA clinically non-viable. However, the chemically similar SAHA had received FDA approval, making it a potentially safer alternate.
White House names new head of AIDS policy office
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President Barack Obama named a Georgetown University health policy expert to head the White House AIDS policy office and coordinate efforts to reduce new HIV infections in the United States, officials said on Thursday.
Jeffrey Cowley, who previously worked for the National Association of People with AIDS activist group, was appointed to head the Office of National AIDS Policy, the White House said.
About 1.1 million Americans are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Hunger, HIV/AIDS hit Africa with double punch: WFP
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A persisting food crisis and rising HIV/AIDS infection rates in Africa form a deadly partnership that is destroying livelihoods and undermining economies in the world’s poorest continent, U.N. experts said on Friday.
This combination could be accentuated by the global economic crisis, which may reduce donor aid for better nutrition and health care, pushing millions more Africans into a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty, disease and death.
“The (rise in) food prices at the beginning of the year and now the economic crisis, this is enormous ... the urgency to act now is so much bigger,” Martin Bloem, the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP)‘s Nutrition and HIV/AIDS Policy chief, said.
Delay in AIDS drug use in South Africa costly
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Researchers from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston estimate that between 2000 and 2005 more than 330,000 lives were lost because a “feasible and timely” AIDS drug treatment program was not implemented in South Africa.
By not implementing a mother-to-child transmission HIV prevention program during the same 5-year period, an estimated 35,000 infants were born with HIV.
Dr. Pride Chigwedere and colleagues describe their analyses that generated these estimates in a Perspectives article published online in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.
