The New York Times details the CDC’s recent report of a rare woman-to-woman HIV transmission. While uncommon, it is still possible for women to infect each other. This news is reminder that preventative measures are important for every regardless of perceived risk. Click here to read the article.
David Wilson
Director, Global HIV/AIDS Program
The World Bank
“The End of AIDS: The Road to Implementation”
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March 13, 2014 – Dr. Rishi Manchanda, President/Founder of HealthBegins, presented on the potential role of social determinants of health in improving the triple aim – i.e. better healthcare quality, population health outcomes, and lower costs. The presentation provided examples of how healthcare professionals, equipped with the tools, technology, and training, can engage colleagues and community stakeholders in developing care delivery interventions that address social determinants of health. Finally, it presented participatory training and “Community Health Detailing” models to describe approaches that can help healthcare systems achieve the triple aim. The presentation was given as part of the HIV Community and Research Colloquia Series hosted by the Los Angeles County (LAC) Commission on HIV and the UCLA Center for HIV Identification, Prevention, and Treatment Services (CHIPTS).
CHIPTS hosts a monthly HIV Research and Community Colloquia Series in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Commission on HIV to highlight current issues and conversations surrounding HIV. Click here for past lectures and check out the events page for more information on future Colloquia presentations!
Learn more by watching, “PrEParing for HIV: An Epidemic Interventions Initiative by the University of California.” HIV/AIDS researchers at the University of California explain how pre-exposure prophylaxis works, and young men share their stories about taking a daily dose of Truvada to preserve their health.”
Stream and view slides from the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) 2104 by going to http://www.croiwebcasts.org
BOSTON — Researchers are reporting that injections of long-lasting AIDS drugs protected monkeys for weeks against infection, a finding that could lead to a major breakthrough in preventing the disease in humans.
Two studies by different laboratory groups each found 100 percent protection in monkeys that got monthly injections of antiretroviral drugs, and there was evidence that a single shot every three months might work just as well.
If the findings can be replicated in humans, they have the potential to overcome a major problem in AIDS prevention: that many people fail to take their antiretroviral pills regularly.
A preliminary human trial is to start late this year, said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, an AIDS expert at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, but a larger trial that could lead to a treatment in humans may still be some years away.
BOSTON — When scientists made the stunning announcement last year that a baby born with H.I.V. had apparently been cured through aggressive drug treatment just 30 hours after birth, there was immediate skepticism that the child had been infected in the first place.
But on Wednesday, the existence of a second such baby was revealed at an AIDS conference here, leaving little doubt that the treatment works. A leading researcher said there might be five more such cases in Canada and three in South Africa.
And a clinical trial in which up to 60 babies who are born infected will be put on drugs within 48 hours is set to begin soon, another researcher added.
If that trial works — and it will take several years of following the babies to determine whether it has — the protocol for treating all 250,000 babies born infected each year worldwide will no doubt be rewritten.
New research from a team led by CHIPTS Policy Director and Public Policy research professor Arleen Leibowitz shows that local health jurisdictions were able to maintain HIV testing near to pre-recession levels despite a substantial reduction in funding during California’s budget 2009 crisis.
As a direct result of state budget cuts that eliminated state funding for HIV prevention and testing, the number of HIV tests administered by California’s public health agencies declined dramatically between 2009 and 2011, the researchers write in the journal Heath Affairs, The state targeted the remaining federal allocation for HIV prevention to the 15 counties (other than Los Angeles and San Francisco) with the greatest prevalence of HIV/AIDS. Counties with lower HIV/AIDS prevalence lost all their state support and saw the number of publicly funded tests plummet by 90 percent. Although testing dropped precipitously, HIV diagnoses fell by a much smaller amount. The 90 percent drop in testing in low-burden areas from 2009 to 2011 resulted in a decline in new diagnoses of only 15.7 percent in those counties. New cases of HIV/AIDS “declined by 6.7 percent in high-burden jurisdictions, despite the fact that their HIV prevention funding was halved and the numbers of HIV tests supported by public funds fell by 19 percent,” the researchers write.
The level of new diagnoses remained high because public health officials responded nimbly to the elimination of state funding, the researchers report. “By targeting the remaining federal resources to the most affected areas and allowing local jurisdictions the flexibility to allocate support to the most effective strategies and the populations at highest risk,” the state reduced the impact of the cuts, Leibowitz said.
“Across-the-board cuts would have resulted in delivering many fewer tests and identifying smaller numbers of new HIV/AIDS cases,” she added.
Although the agencies were able to mitigate the impact of the cuts, prevention activities were still reduced. Agencies were forced to scale back or eliminate risk-reduction and education programs, restructure program staffing, and seek external funding for testing and operations. In the sea of red ink, public health officials clung to a raft of testing regimens above other prevention methods.
“HIV testing is a crucial first step in identifying people living with HIV, who can then begin treatment to maintain their health,” Leibowitz said. “Treatment is also a key prevention strategy because it dramatically reduces transmission of the virus to others.” Even with the increased emphasis on testing, however, the reduced funding pool meant that “fewer than 520 Californians a year were not informed that they had been infected with HIV,” the researchers write.
Now that California’s budget outlook is improving, HIV testing should be strengthened and expanded, Leibowitz said. “California’s improved fiscal situation could allow for restoring resources for free, publicly-funded HIV testing, so necessary to the ‘HIV treatment as prevention’ strategy,” she said.
The article, “HIV Tests And New Diagnoses Declined After California Budget Cuts, But Reallocating Funds Helped Reduce Impact,” appears in the March 2014 issue of Health Affairs. Leibowitz’s coauthors are Karen Byrnes, Adriane Wynn and Kevin Farrell of UCLA’s California HIV/AIDS Policy Research Center. Support came from the UCLA Center for HIV Identification, Prevention, and Treatment Services, which is funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. The California HIV/AIDS Research Program and the UCLA AIDS Institute also sported this research.
View the briefing by clicking here:
http://www.healthaffairs.org/events/2014_03_11_hiv_aids/
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/33/3/418.abstract
Alex Boekelheide
(“Buckle-hide”)
Executive Director, Communications
UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
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310-206-0159 desk
310-889-8275310-889-8275 mobile
Alex.Boekelheide@luskin.ucla.edu
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Kathy Sanders-Phillips, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Pediatrics
Howard University College of Medicine
George Washington University
“HIV/AIDS Risk in South Africa-Implications for Research in the U.S.”
Each week, Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin brings listeners an unexpected side of the news by talking with someone personally affected by the stories making headlines.
Reed Vreeland was born with HIV, which means he has struggled for most of his 27 years deciding how and when to inform people about his illness. His mom was infected, but his dad was not.
Dozens of states criminalize HIV exposure, or perceived exposure, through sex, shared needles or, in some states, exposure to “bodily fluids” that can include saliva. Reed works for an organization, the Sero Project, that fights these state HIV criminalization laws.
Vreeland has very clear memories about the day his dad told him about his HIV. “I immediately just started crying, because we’d read in our first grade class a book about HIV and AIDS,” he tells NPR’s Rachel Martin. “I remember the first thing I thought of was ‘Oh, I’m like the kids in the book.’ … And the book was about AIDS in Africa and about kids in Africa dying of AIDS.”
His own mother died of AIDS when he was 10, and “the pain of losing her was even more intense,” Vreeland says, “because I knew I had what she had.” She had many complications in her last few years, and grew extremely weak. “I could beat her in an arm wrestle as a 10-year-old and she was just so fragile. It’s just so hard to see a parent in that state and then know you could be next.”