Congratulations to the IMPACT 2012 Runner-Up!
“Silent Love” by:
Nestor Venegas, Ari DeLeon, Fanny Ramirez, Patrick Freeman, Victor Hernandez, Cesar Hernandez, Julio Reyes, and Manny Pacheco
“Silent Love” was the product of one of the many HIV prevention programs at Vista Community Clinic which targets youth of color in non-traditional school settings (e.g., juvenile justice system, alcohol and drug rehabilitation facilities, homeless shelters, etc.).
The program, titled CHATncsd, is an initiative funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health. The program is unique in that it utilizes peer health educators to disseminate HIV prevention messages in person and via social media.
They are currently using Facebook (facebook.com/CHATncsd), Twitter (twitter.com/CHATncsd), and YouTube(youtube.com/CHATncsd) to accomplish this objective (YouTube houses the rest of the videos that were created through this program).
CLICK HERE to learn more about IMPACT 2012.
Congratulations to the IMPACT 2012 Grand Prize Winner!
“How I Use A Condom” by:
Sonny Ngyuyen and Justin Taylor
Artist Bio: Justin Taylor
Justin Taylor is a graduate from The Evergreen State College where his focuses were on media production and business leadership. Justin has volunteered as the marketing director for Capital City Pride for the past two years and he currently works as an HIV/AIDS prevention coordinator for Pierce County AIDS Foundation where he runs the Mpowerment Olympia project. Mpowerment Olympia seeks to mobilize young gay and bisexual men to create positive social connections for themselves while promoting safer-sex. With his background in media and an outstanding volunteer team, Justin has been able to find exciting new ways of engaging with his local gay community. Justin continues to be amazed by the dedication and talent of the volunteers he works with, specifically his friend and colleague Sonny Nguyen.
Presently, Justin is screening is first short film, “Tying the Knot” at film festivals across the nation. “Tying the Knot” was a successfully funded Kickstarter project about a closeted politician trying to find redemption through his secret kinky relationship with a male prostitute. As an artist, he’s held firm in the belief that the further you can transport someone outside of what they know, only for them to find the interconnection of our shared human experience; that’s the potential magic of creation that happens every time someone views your art.
“Whatever your goal is in life, it has to withstand the process, and drive you every step of the way to see it become something tangible, something real and effectual” – Justin Taylor
More info can be found at: Mpoweroly.org and JCTaylordesign.com
Artist Bio: Sonny Nguyen
Sonny Nguyen is a queer person of color, a community organizer, and a storyteller. To Sonny, all of these things are the same, are crucial to informing each other. Through spoken word poetry, Sonny weaves the realities of people living on the intersections of hardships into collective stories and messages. Sonny does not claim to speak for any movements, but does their best to echo the voices of those around them. Sonny’s work has been featured at queer events and youth poetry events across the Puget Sound area, but can regularly be seen on the Hook Up, Mpowerment Olympia’s YouTube show at www.youtube.com/mpoweroly. Sonny is very humbled to be part of a winning team with peer and close friend Justin Taylor.
CLICK HERE to learn more about IMPACT 2012.
On July 27 2012, Through Positive Eyes was featured on the New York Times Lens Blog!
Through Positive Eyestells the story of HIV/AIDS at the end of the third decade of the epidemic, when potent antiretroviral medication has been devised, but when treatment access is far from universal. 
Through Positive Eyes is an attempt to address key themes of the AIDS epidemic: widespread stigma, extreme social inequality, and limited access to lifesaving medication. The project is based on the belief that challenging stigma against people living with HIV/AIDS is the most effective method for combating the epidemic—and that art is a powerful way to do this. Over the next two years HIV-positive people in six countries and on five continents will take part in this unique initiative, creating powerful personal photo essays. From these images, we will create local and international advocacy materials including exhibitions, short films, a book, and this website.
Through Positive Eyes has been produced in Mexico City (August 2008), Rio de Janeiro (June 2009), and Johannesburg (March 2010). Next, the project will travel to Chennai, Kiev, and New York City.
The project is co-directed by London-based South African photographer and AIDS activist Gideon Mendel, who has been chronicling HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa since 1993. Since then his groundbreaking work on the issue has been widely recognized. Through magazine publications, multimedia web and video presentations, and his book, A Broken Landscape, Mendel has been commended for empowering his subjects rather than representing them as objects of pity.
CLICK HERE to see the project website.
Paul Semugoma, a physician from Uganda, spoke passionately about the need for providers and communities to acknowledge that men who have sex with men are everywhere, and that they have special needs in terms of prevention that need to be addressed – especially stigma and decriminalization of homosexuality. He encouraged all of us to “end invisibility” of MSM in epidemiology, care provision, and policy-making.
Cheryl Overs, founder of an Australian advocacy group for sex workers, discussed special needs of this population in terms of HIV prevention. She detailed how biomedical prevention tools are incapable of addressing the power imbalance between sex workers and their clients, or to tackle multiple structural and societal issues that act against these women and men.
Debbie McMillan, a transgendered woman and former sex worker and drug addict, reflected on her own experiences on the street, in prison, and in recovery from drugs. She spoke poignantly about the impact of stigma on highly marginalized populations and her work as an advocate and peer counselor for these men and women. She echoed Cheryl Overs in a call to include representatives of at-risk communities in the design and implementation of prevention and advocacy programs – but in a meaningful way, not just as a token.
Gottfried Hirnschall, with the WHO, described his optimism about global ARV scale-up, and his confidence that 15 million people can be placed on ARVs by 2015. He reviewed data on ARV scale-up, and suggested that planning for programs beyond the 15 million mark ought to begin now – especially in light of the movement toward earlier and earlier treatment.
Intersection of Non-Communicable Diseases and Ageing in HIV- Judy Currier
Plenary from AIDS 2012
Many people wonder if HIV with aging is a double hit to the immune system leading and whether this underlies some of the chronic diseases we are seeing……diet & exercise reduce risk……Failure to address these problems could lead to an erosion of the benefits of ART in the years ahead.
Aging with HIV increases risk for NCD” (chronic comorbid disease-heart disease, cancers, diabetes, renal, neurologic diseases, mental health, gastroenterologic diseases).
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Let’s Stop HIV Together national HIV awareness and anti-stigma campaign features the stories of 22 individuals living with HIV and the steps they are taking to encourage others in the fight against HIV. Learn more at www.ActAgainstAIDS.org. Get the Facts. Get Tested. Get Involved.
While the use of antiretroviral therapies to prevent HIV infection will likely dominate the scientific agenda at the 19th International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2012) in Washington, D.C, July 22-27, researchers are also paying attention to AIDS vaccines. VAX Science Writer Regina McEnery recently caught up with Barton Haynes, a Duke University professor who leads the virtual consortium known as the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI), to hear more about new findings from the RV144 trial in Thailand and the search for more potent and broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV, which will be the subject of his July 25 plenary talk at AIDS 2012.
Even the most optimistic people feel an AIDS vaccine with sufficient efficacy is still years away. Will we get there?
I’m hoping that we will and I’m optimistic that we will.
What will be the main highlights of your talk?
The new findings that have energized the AIDS vaccine field. These findings will include identifying the immune correlates of infection risk in the RV144 trial, the elucidation of many transmitted/founder viruses (the viruses that cause infection in human to human transmission), the discovery of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs), and insights as to why bNAbs have been so difficult to induce. Everyone believes these new discoveries can provide important clues to speeding up the development of a preventive vaccine. Seven to eight years ago, the field was frustrated that we didn’t know what to do and we certainly didn’t know how to do it. What is different now is we have clues. We do know some people can make [potent] antibodies over long periods of time that we want to elicit over a shorter period of time in a vaccine.
Is the vaccine problem solvable?
The observation that there appear to be antibodies that can hit the Achilles heel of the Envelope [HIV’s surface protein] and be made in certain people is one indication that this is a solvable problem. The immune correlates of infection risk found in the RV144 trial are also clues for further studies. I think there are strategies based upon these observations that the field is beginning to explore.
Can you describe one of those strategies?
Most of the bNAbs are unusual in some respects. These unusual characteristics are in general indications that they are the products of either quite convoluted or disfavored developmental pathways. There are a series of technologies that have been developed whereby these pathways can be determined and studied with the goal of trying to recreate the pathways with a series of vaccine immunogens [active ingredients in vaccines] that can bypass these torturous pathways and follow more productive pathways.
Convoluted pathways?
As antibody clones expand, they undergo changes. An antibody that travels down a short developmental pathway has fewer changes, whereas those traveling down longer pathways have more changes. Many of these bNAbs are among the [most] mutated and changed antibodies. Most of the vaccine [candidates] we have now induce antibodies that only have a few changes in their building blocks, whereas it takes several years of continuous stimulation of the immune system by the infecting virus to drive these mutations or changes in the bNAbs. We want to drive antibodies to have more mutations but to use a shorter pathway and we are just now exploring ways to do that.
This sounds complicated.
HIV is different from other viruses for which successful vaccines have been made because, among these, HIV is the only virus that has the trait of integrating into the host genome. Unlike any other vaccine, we will have to have sterilizing immunity at the time of HIV transmission for a vaccine to be successful.
When will we be able to test a candidate derived from these strategies?
We are in preclinical studies in non-human primates now. The timing of human studies will depend on the outcome of these preclinical studies.
CLICK HERE to read the original article from VAXreport.org, the bulletin on AIDS vaccine research.
In this moving story, “Hatsume” (not her real name) talks about her shame and fear of being judged by her friends for being HIV-positive. “Hatsume” is a young, Japanese American woman. This story and more are part of “Taking Root: Our Stories, Our Community,” a national digital storytelling initiative to engage Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities in ending HIV stigma. Watch more stories at www.banyantreeproject.org. Start the conversation #withoutshame.
About Taking Root: It’s been said that it takes a thousand voices to tell a single story. “Taking Root” is grounded in the power of the individual story, but its territory extends beyond the individual. We are a multitude of voices: there is no singular Asian American or Pacific Islander experience, and the face of HIV is as diverse as the people affected by it. Through the connections forged by these individual experiences, we are able to tell a story about the ways we are affected by HIV. Together, these stories heal and it is through the telling and witnessing of them that we learn to overcome our silence and shame. As “Taking Root” grows, it will eventually include stories from AA and NHPI communities across the US and the six US-affiliated Pacific Island Jurisdictions.
Digital storytelling is a form of short narrative told in the first person and enhanced by sound, video, and symbolic imagery. These are true stories from AAs and NHPIs recounting the ways in which HIV has affected and altered their lives. The stories were developed during an intensive 3-day workshop facilitated by Center for Digital Storytelling where participants were trained to produce their own story, from developing their own narrative and producing a voiceover, to using audiovisual and editing equipment to create the final video. “Taking Root” stories will be promoted at community events nationwide and online through our social networks and partners.
Uganda Youth Development Link (UYDEL)
Read about the project HERE.