AIDS/HIV
South Africans beef up at gym to battle AIDS, crime
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With bulging biceps and abs like steel, South Africa’s jobless youngsters are turning to bodybuilding to help them fight AIDS and resist a life of crime.
Makeshift gyms are springing up across the country’s poorest and toughest townships, aimed at helping members develop discipline over delinquency and stay healthy as HIV/AIDS ravages their communities.
New approach flushes out hidden HIV
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A strategy used by the wily AIDS virus to perpetuate infection may be susceptible to attack, according to a new report.
One of the fundamental difficulties in trying to eradicate HIV in people infected with the virus is that, even with the best antiviral treatment, small numbers of the virus can lie dormant in immune cells, ready to break out and multiply rapidly when the opportunity occurs.
This week, researchers report a way to flush the latent virus out of its hiding place in resting CD4 cells (immune cells that have not been activated to fight off microbes), and then pick it off with potent drugs.
S. African business slowly wakes up to AIDS challenge
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When Martin Vosloo told his work colleagues that he was infected with the virus that causes AIDS, some spat in his face and threatened to kill him.
That was about six years ago, soon after Vosloo, 48, joined South Africa’s power utility Eskom.
“They spat in my face. I was called names and on two occasions I had to flee because I was threatened with death,” said Vosloo, a healthy-looking white South African.
Study confirms drug combo prevents AIDS
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Combination treatment with anti-AIDS drugs cut the rate of progression from infection with HIV to AIDS by 86 percent compared to patients not receiving treatment, British researchers said on Friday.
They found that the effectiveness of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), a combination of at least three agents from two drug classes, increased with time.
“Our results indicate that HAART reduced the rate of progression to AIDS by 86 percent and that its effectiveness compared with no treatment increased with time since initiation,” said Dr. Jonathan Sterne, of the University of Bristol, in southwestern England, who headed the research team.
S. Africa police ripped for firing on AIDS activists
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Activists condemned South African police on Thursday for firing rubber bullets and smoke grenades at AIDS protesters marching on a hospital to demand the government improve access to life-prolonging drugs.
Forty people were injured and 10 treated for gunshot wounds after police fired on protesters at a hospital in the Eastern Cape region on Tuesday, said the country’s leading AIDS activist group Treatment Action Campaign, which organised the march.
S. Africa health dept sharply hikes AIDS estimate
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New figures from South Africa suggest that more than 6.5 million of the country’s 47 million people may now be HIV-positive. The figure is a sharp jump on previous estimates and is likely to fuel debate on the extent of the country’s HIV/AIDS pandemic.
The Department of Health, releasing a 2004 study of women at antenatal clinics, said results indicated that between 6.29 and 6.57 million South Africans now carry the HIV virus against 5.6 million at the end of 2003.
War, prostitution fuel AIDS epidemic in Ivory Coast
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“Love me”, says the slogan above a red heart emblazoned on Kati Soro’s T-shirt, “with a condom”.
A foot soldier in a second battle raging alongside Ivory Coast’s civil war, she is on the front line fighting AIDS.
Soro, 20, became a member of her local AIDS awareness association in the northern town of Ferkessedougou last year, “because the problem is getting worse”.
Glaxo and IAVI to develop HIV vaccine
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A public-private partnership to develop a vaccine to prevent AIDS was announced on Tuesday by GlaxoSmithKline and the not-for-profit International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI).
In a statement, GSK said the collaboration—the first between IAVI and a major vaccine company—would facilitate early research and development of its “promising” adenovirus vaccine vector technology.
The vectors are derived from adenoviruses, originally isolated from non-human primates, which have been engineered to be non-infectious and capable of efficiently delivering genes expressing HIV proteins to the immune system.
Zambia to put debt relief into AIDS fight
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Zambia will use millions of dollars freed up by debt relief to provide AIDS drugs for 100,000 people by the end of the year, a minister said on Monday.
Finance Minister Ng’andu Magande said the plan to provide free antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) was approved by cabinet last week after Zambia received additional debt relief from the Group of Eight (G8) rich nations.
Job cuts, HIV add to southern Africa food woes
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Late drought has devastated crops in much of southern Africa and may threaten the worst food shortages in more than a decade, but in parts of the region residents say the real problems are AIDS and job losses.
Poor rains in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and parts of Mozambique have all but destroyed the staple maize harvest, aid workers say. But further south in the mountain kingdoms of Swaziland and Lesotho, the weather is less to blame.
“The drought is not as bad as last year,” resident Mothibeli Seala told Reuters in a village in southern Lesotho. “But the food will not be enough. The HIV scourge is very bad. It is hitting production at village level, killing the strongest.”
