Yearly Archives: 2013

SEATTLE – A growing HIV testing program is rebelling against a culture of medical privacy by screening gay couples together.

While traditional HIV testing is done individually and in private, Testing Together allows men in relationships to learn their HIV status with their partner. Counselors develop a customized HIV prevention and care strategy catered to a couple’s specific circumstances so they can work together to prevent or treat the infection.

The program was developed by Dr. Patrick Sullivan and Dr. Rob Stephenson of Emory University based on research they conducted with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2009, they discovered one-third to two-thirds of new HIV infections came from main partners among gay couples.

“That was surprising,” Sullivan said. “It changed the way we thought about preventative services and intervention.”

Sullivan and Stephenson also discovered a significant number of men in longer-term relationships were unaware of their partner’s HIV status. In fact, many gay men in relationships believed they were less at risk for HIV and were therefore less likely to have been recently tested for HIV, Sullivan said.

In 2011, Testing Together began training HIV community-support organizations in Seattle and four other major cities on testing and counseling skills specifically for gay couples. They addressed how to cope with an HIV-positive status, maintaining safer behaviors between partners and helping couples navigate treatment when one or both partners is found to be HIV-positive.

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It’s the 1980s in Russia.

A scientific research center in Siberia said Wednesday that it discovered a new strain of HIV — the virus that causes AIDS — and that it is spreading throughout Russia “at a rapid rate,” RIA Novosti newswire reported today.

The subtype was detected in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk in 2006 and now accounts for more than 50% of new HIV infections in the region, Novosibirsk’s Koltsovo science city said in a statement. The number of HIV-positive people living in the Novosibirsk Region has leaped from about 2,000 in 2007 up to 15,000 in 2012, according to Russia’s Federal AIDS Center.

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EW YORK — Elton John honored Hillary Rodham Clinton for her work to help those affected by HIV and AIDS at an annual event for his foundation.

Clinton was excited as she accepted the first founders award from the Elton John AIDS Foundation on Tuesday night in New York. The former secretary of state told the crowd at Cipriani’s restaurant that “we still have so far to go” when it comes to helping those affected by HIV and AIDS.

“There are so many challenges in front of us,” Clinton said. The former U.S. senator added that she wants to see an “AIDS-free generation” and that accomplishing that must be “our north star.”

“I thank you, but I know there’s more for us to do,” she said. “Humans may discriminate, but viruses don’t.”

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There have been numerous studies showing how dogs can benefit human health, by sniffing out cancer, for example. Now it is time for cats to shine, as researchers say they may hold the key to a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) vaccine.

Researchers from the University of Florida and the University of California, San Francisco, have discovered that blood from patients infected with HIV shows an immune response against a feline AIDS virus protein.

Janet Yamamoto, professor of retroviral immunology at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Florida and corresponding study author, told Medical News Today:

“Since FIV (feline immunodeficiency virus) and HIV-1 are distant cousins and their sequences are similar, we used the T cells from HIV positive human subjects to see if they can react and induce anti-HIV activity to small regions of FIV protein, which lead to the current story.”

The team’s findings are published in the Journal of Virology.

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A common drug that dermatologists prescribe to treat nail fungus appears to come with a not-so-tiny side effect: eradicating HIV.

In a study performed at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, not only does the drug Ciclopirox completely eradicate infectious HIV from cell cultures, but unlike today’s most cutting-edge antiviral treatments, the virus doesn’t bounce back when the drug is withheld. This means it may not require a lifetime of use to keep HIV at bay.

The same group of researchers had previously shown that Ciclopirox — approved by the FDA and Europe’s EMA as safe for human use to treat foot fungus — inhibits the expression of HIV genes in culture. Now they have found that it also blocks the essential function of the mitochondria, which results in the reactivation of the cell’s suicide pathway, all while sparing the healthy cells.

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The global rate of new HIV infections among adults and children has fallen by 33 percent since 2001, according to a new report that touts major progress against HIV transmission to kids.

Among children specifically, there were 260,000 new infections as of 2012, which is a 52 percent decrease since 2001. Sixty-two percent of pregnant women were provided antiretroviral drugs, which greatly helps in preventing the transmission of the virus to their unborn children. AIDS-related deaths have also dropped 30 percent since 2005, when the highest mortality rates were recorded.

The statistics were published by UNAIDS in a global report on the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Still, the UNAIDS report revealed that an estimated 35.3 million people were living with HIV around the world in 2012. About 2.3 million got infected that year, and 1.6 million people died due to AIDS-related illnesses

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Scientists have identified a gene which they say may have the ability to prevent HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from spreading after it enters the body.

In an early-stage study in the journal Nature, researchers said the gene, called MX2, appears to play a key role in how HIV is controlled in human cells, so using it could lead to the development of new, less toxic treatments that harness the body’s natural defenses and mobilize them against the virus.

Although there are many more years of research ahead, Mike Malim, who co-led the research at King’s College London, described the finding as “extremely exciting” and said it advanced scientists’ understanding of how the HIV virus interacts with the immune system.

“Until now we knew very little about the MX2 gene, but now we recognize both its potent anti-viral function and a key point of vulnerability in the life cycle of HIV,” he said in a statement about the study, published on Wednesday.
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Research published in the journal Nature has shown that vaccinated monkeys can clear Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) infection from their bodies.

It was effective in nine of the 16 monkeys that were inoculated.

The US scientists say they now want to use a similar approach to test a vaccine for HIV in humans.

Prof Louis Picker, from the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute at Oregon Health and Science University, said: “It’s always tough to claim eradication – there could always be a cell which we didn’t analyse that has the virus in it. But for the most part, with very stringent criteria… there was no virus left in the body of these monkeys.”

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