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Yemen Times examines HIV/AIDS surveillance, discrimination related to disease in country

Although Yemen -- which has recorded 2,431 HIV/AIDS cases -- is considered one of the countries with the lowest number of people living with the disease worldwide, some organizations, including the country's National AIDS Control Program, say that the numbers likely do not accurately reflect the true number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the country, the Yemen Times reports.

13 Aug 2008

New efforts to reduce spread of HIV among MSM

The AP/Google.com on Friday examined new approaches to curbing the spread of HIV among men who have sex with men. A program in North Carolina that showed "promising signs" enlisted local MSM opinion leaders to urge their peers to practice safer sex in an effort to curb the spread of HIV, the AP/Google.com reports.

13 Aug 2008

Poverty, population movement contributing to spread of HIV in Sudan

Poverty and the movement of people displaced by war have contributed to an increase in the number of HIV/AIDS cases in Sudan, United Nations and Sudanese health officials said on Sunday, adding that a lack of data is hindering efforts to get an accurate picture of the disease in the country, the AP/International Herald Tribune reports.

13 Aug 2008

About 1% of HIV-positive people worldwide have been tested for tuberculosis

Only 1% of people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide have been screened for tuberculosis, according to a report recently released by the coalition Advocacy To Control TB Internationally, or ACTION, Reuters reports.

13 Aug 2008

FDA approves Gilead's antiretroviral Viread for hepatitis B

Gilead Sciences on Monday announced that it has received FDA approval to market its antiretroviral drug Viread as a hepatitis B treatment, the AP/International Herald Tribune reports (AP/International Herald Tribune, 8/12).

13 Aug 2008

Study to look at health care system trust among Hispanics with HIV

Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in September will begin a two-year study to determine whether a lack of trust of the U.S. medical system is a factor behind a higher mortality rate among Hispanics with HIV/AIDS, the Winston-Salem Journal reports.

13 Aug 2008

HHS Secretary Leavitt to visit HIV/AIDS projects in Cote d'Ivoire

HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt on Wednesday is scheduled to arrive in Cote d'Ivoire, where he will visit projects aimed at fighting HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, AFP/Google.com reports.

13 Aug 2008

CDC report on HIV/AIDS in U.S. should serve as 'wake-up call' for policymakers, health workers

A recent CDC report on HIV/AIDS in the U.S. -- which found that about 56,000 new HIV infections occur in the U.S. each year -- "should serve as a wake-up call from the AIDS amnesia surrounding the domestic epidemic in recent years," Susan Blumenthal, senior policy and medical adviser at the Foundation for AIDS Research, and Melissa Shive, a former research assistant at amfAR and medical student at the University of California-San Francisco, write in a Washington Times opinion piece.

13 Aug 2008

NanoBio vaccine for hepatitis B shows promise

Chronic hepatitis B infects 400 million people worldwide, many of them children. Even with three effective vaccines available, hepatitis B remains a stubborn, unrelenting health problem, especially in Africa and other developing areas. The disease and its complications cause an estimated 1 million deaths globally each year.

13 Aug 2008

Californian bill to revolutionize HIV testing passes legislature unanimously

AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the operator of the largest non-government HIV testing program in California, today praised the California Legislature for its passage this week of Assembly Bill 2899 (Portantino, D-Pasadena).

13 Aug 2008

Rare case explains why some infected with HIV remain symptom free without antiretroviral drugs

AIDS experts at Johns Hopkins say they have compelling evidence that some people with HIV who for years and even decades show extremely low levels of the virus in their blood never progress to full-blown AIDS and remain symptom free even without treatment, probably do so because of the strength of their immune systems, not any defects in the strain of HIV that infected them in the first place.

12 Aug 2008

Viread approved for chronic hepatitis B

The FDA has approved Viread (tenofovir disoproxil fumarate) as a treatment option for adults with chronic hepatitis B, a serious liver disease.

11 Aug 2008

NanoViricides reports HIVCide-I significantly superior to current anti-HIV three drug cocktail standard

NanoViricides, Inc. said that additional biological tests and data analysis have shown that animals treated with its lead anti-HIV drug candidate, HIVCide-I, demonstrated a substantially greater reduction in viral load -- number of infectious virus particles per milliliter of blood -- when compared to the animals given the anti-HIV "combo cocktail" in a preliminary animal study. An important objective of anti-HIV treatment is to minimize the viral load.

11 Aug 2008

Children with HIV in poor countries more adherent to treatment than children in rich countries

Researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine, the Regenstrief Institute and Moi University School of Medicine are the first to report that adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) to fight human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in children who live in low income countries is as high as or higher than adherence by children living in high income countries.

11 Aug 2008

Technological crystal ball boosts AIDS survival

A cure for the virus that causes AIDS may still be beyond our grasp, but European researchers have developed a predictive software system for HIV that could help extend the lives of victims of the killer disease.

11 Aug 2008

RNAi used to dramatically suppress HIV infection in an organism

Hopes languished last September when a promising candidate HIV vaccine failed to work. Despite this setback, many researchers still believe immunization is possible, and a new study suggests they're correct-at least at the cellular level.

10 Aug 2008

Luminaries call for continued support for an AIDS vaccine to end the epidemic

Discussions about how to manage AIDS in the long term and how to improve prevention efforts globally took center stage at this year's International AIDS Conference (IAC) held in Mexico City.

10 Aug 2008

New study aims to help Latino HIV patients

Researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center will soon begin researching how a lack of trust in formal medicine is contributing to disproportionately higher mortality rates in Latino HIV patients than in white HIV patients across the country.

10 Aug 2008

Hope overlooked in policies to tackle HIV/AIDS

The links between HIV transmission and the degree to which people are able to adopt realistic plans to achieve future projects, in other words, hope, have been overlooked in policies to tackle HIV/AIDS. New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) argues that hope is a powerful tool in the battle to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS.

8 Aug 2008

Medicinal cannabis effective for neuropathic pain in HIV

In a double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial to assess the impact of smoked medical cannabis, or marijuana, on the neuropathic pain associated with HIV, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine found that reported pain relief was greater with cannabis than with a placebo.

6 Aug 2008