More in Uganda: Minister Comments Carelessly on HIV/AIDS

Via In2EA.

The Health Minister Christine Ondoa’s remarks that HIV/Aids can be cured through prayer have not been received well by both health practitioners and born-again preachers who called it careless and misleading remarks.

Yesterday, Ms Ondoa was quoted by the Observer newspaper to have had a firsthand experience with people she claimed were infected by the HIV/Aids virus but after a series of prayer, tested negative.

She, however, observed that medical workers and the general public should be cautious about people who claim they were healed of HIV, adding that as a scientist she is often careful not to automatically believe a person who comes to her presenting negative results after being prayed for. Such a person’s sero status must be checked and their medical records that show they tested positive must be scrutinised, Ms Ondoa added.

The Head of The Aids Support Organisation (TASO), Mr Richard Ochai, who refused to believe that a minister could say such a thing, said such statements, most especially from born-again churches, are continuously curtailing TASO efforts to fight against HIV/Aids whose prevalence in recent years is said to have increased in the country.

He said science has proved that if one takes ARVs the viral load will become low such that they may not be detected but once they stop taking the drug, the virus will definitely be seen again. “We know God can do miracles if he so wishes but these many possibilities still need scientific prove,” Dr Ochai said.

Read the rest here.

[If an item is not written by an IRMA member, it should not be construed that IRMA has taken a position on the article's content, whether in support or in opposition.]

From 'What if' to 'What Now': Implementing the New Prevention Technologies

Via AIDSMap, by Gus Cairns.

Two consecutive sessions at the sixth International AIDS Society conference in Rome yesterday were devoted, now we have convincing scientific data on the benefits of treatment as prevention and PrEP, to putting these new prevention methods into practice.

“We have moved from ‘What if?’ to ‘What now?’” was the comment of Mitchell Warren, Executive Director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC), on what else we need to know, what barriers need to be addressed , and what resources might be required, to maximise the promise of antiretroviral-based prevention.

Anthony Fauci, Director of the US National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said: “We now have a solid scientific foundation to say that even in the absence of a vaccine we have the capacity to end the epidemic. I can’t go to the US President and say: 'We can cure HIV.’ But I can say ‘Ending the epidemic is scientifically doable’.”

Earlier, however, Nancy Padian from the Office of the US Global AIDS Coordinator had outlined formidable challenges still to be answered if antiretroviral treatment could bring about this goal.

She said that questions still needing answers include whether antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) really are a durable and reliable means of viral load suppression over a period of years and whether increasing the proportion of people on treatment would lead to increased levels of resistance. The biggest practical question, however, was whether treatment as prevention would work in situations where a high proportion of transmissions came from people with acute, recent HIV infections.

The biggest barriers to treatment as prevention, however, are stigma and lack of resources. Implementing ARV-based prevention would not only be expensive in terms of drugs; it would require added human resources and increased training and task-shifting for prevention counsellors so they can deal with biomedical data. There would also be added costs in terms of tests and monitoring.

The other big barrier will be the stigma of being tested, she said, particularly for at-risk populations in societies where injecting drug use, male-male sex, or sex work were criminalised and stigmatised. Treatment as prevention would require people not simply to test and then go to more supportive community organisations for prevention advice; it required a much closer relationship with medical personnel who might be prejudiced or feared to be so.

Mitchell Warren issued a call to action to implement the new strategies, but his presentation was tempered by realism. “We have evidence, we have data, and we now need to make decisions,” he said.

Read the rest here.

[If an item is not written by an IRMA member, it should not be construed that IRMA has taken a position on the article's content, whether in support or in opposition.]

The Man Who Had HIV and Now Does Not

Via New York Magazine, by Tina Rosenberg

Four years ago, Timothy Brown underwent an innovative procedure. Since then, test after test has found absolutely no trace of the virus in his body. The bigger miracle, though, is how his case has experts again believing they just might find a cure for AIDS.

AIDS is a disease of staggering numbers, of tragically recursive devastation. Since the first diagnosis, 30 years ago this June 5, HIV has infected more than 60 million people, around 30 million of whom have died. For another 5 million, anti-retroviral therapy has made their infection a manageable though still chronic condition. Until four years ago, Timothy Brown was one of those people.


Brown is a 45-year-old translator of German who lives in San Francisco. He is of medium height and very skinny, with thinning brown hair. He found out he had HIV in 1995. He had not been tested for the virus in half a decade, but that year a former partner turned up positive. “You’ve probably got only two years to live,” the former partner told him when Brown got his results.

Read the rest here.

[If an item is not written by an IRMA member, it should not be construed that IRMA has taken a position on the article's content, whether in support or in opposition.]

Microbicides, vaccines may need to repel HIV contact at mucosa

via Aidsmap News, by Keith Alcorn

Scientists have been faced with the question of how HIV actually gets underneath epithelial cells to infect other cells that are susceptible to HIV. "It's not the cells on top," Kaushic said. "It is the immune cells underneath that have all the receptors that HIV likes to latch on to and that allow the virus to replicate and establish infection. But it has to cross the epithelial barrier first!"

"This is a significant step forward in defining where prevention strategies, such as microbicides and vaccine, need to focus. Instead of trying to stop HIV from infecting the target cells underneath the epithelium, we need to think about ways to stop the virus from attaching to epithelial cells themselves," said Charu Kaushic.

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POZ: Your Money or Your Life - An interview with Kevin Frost

"We continue to fund research on microbicides—we’re particularly interested in rectal microbicides."

POZ asks Kevin Frost, CEO of the Foundation for AIDS Research, the $100,000 question that HIV-positive inquiring minds want to know: Does it pay to cure AIDS?

The Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) is one of the richest foundations in the world funding the hunt for the AIDS cure. Since 1985, it has invested nearly $275 million in the development of basic science in private research labs hoping that with its financial backing, scientists will crack the code and shut down HIV for good. Kevin Frost, amfAR’s CEO, goes where few others will—admitting that they are in red-hot pursuit of the holy grail: the end of AIDS.

In this climate of global economic instability, large pharmaceutical companies are increasingly beholden to their shareholders and, as a result, increasingly more risk-adverse. As a result, the gap between biotech development—the spoils of indie labs—and the reality of those products being brought to market is widening dangerously. In a time when AIDS has topped all previous tallies for total number of deaths and the number of people living with—and orphaned by—the disease, there are inversely proportionate responses on the scientific and investment fronts.

Add to that mix the fact that, untreated, AIDS threatens to spread its deadly swath wider and exponentially faster than ever before. As a result, it will further undermine global economic stability by killing entire generations of workforces in developing nations, threatening to drain the federal reserves of nations around the world and leaving in its wake an uneducated army of abandoned children some 14 million-strong and growing daily.

This is the environment in which we are struggling to outwit one of the craftiest retroviruses known to man. Contrary to conspiracy theories and legitimate questions about certain parties’ inherent interest in continuing the epidemic, Frost assures us that the world can no longer pay the price—both in terms of dollars and precious lives—of not putting an end to the AIDS pandemic.

Read the interview on POZ.