HIV
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Whether or not HIV -infected intravenous drug users (IDUs) disclose their status to their sex partners depends on different factors, according to a report in the journal AIDS Patient Care and STDs.
FDA's failure to update the labels of products containing the spermicide nonoxynol-9 to warn of the increased risk of contracting HIV among women who use the products puts consumers at risk, according to a... Government Accountability Office report scheduled to be released on Tuesday, the Washington Post reports (Connolly, Washington Post, 4/12).
Most gay bars in New York City have stopped stocking free condoms, a dramatic turnaround from the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic when condoms were plentiful at most gay venues, The New York Times reports. HIV prevention literature, which also was at one time available at nearly every gay bar and club in the city, is now also increasingly difficult to find.
Coming soon to a cinema, Laundromat or nail salon near you: free condoms, if city officials get their way. "We can stop the HIV epidemic with the tools that we have today," Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden said yesterday. "We know that condoms prevent HIV - let's get them out everywhere."
(New York City - The Associated Press) Posted: May 23, 2005 8:00 pm ET
A commission studying HIV/AIDS issued a list of recommendations Monday for containing the disease in New York City, including making condoms more widely available and pushing for more HIV testing.
Erasure's Andy Bell was one of the first pop stars to come out as being gay. And now the singer, perhaps best known as the voice behind the band's 1988 hit "Chains of Love," has become one of the first pop stars to come out as being HIV positive. Bell has known his status since June 1998, when he came down with a case of pneumonia, and was quite happy keeping the news to himself. But when speculation started last winter about his health ? especially surrounding his recent double hip replacement (which wasn't related to the virus, but had required a lot of medical care) ? Bell thought he'd set the record straight and try to erase some of the stigma at the same time.
(WebMD) A growing number of older Americans are living with HIV and AIDS, but few may be receiving advice on how to avoid spreading the disease, experts told lawmakers last week.
Infection rates aren't increasing in either younger or older people, health officials say. But the widespread use of antiretroviral drugs in patients in the U.S. has greatly extended the lives of AIDS patients and caused many more to live into later years. Today in the U.S., 28 percent of those living with HIV/AIDS are over the age of 50, and by 2015 that will increase to 50 percent, said Sen. Gordon H. Smith (R-Ore.)
While much of the public?s attention is focused on young people contracting almost half of all new HIV and AIDS cases, there a growing HIV/AIDS problem developing among the elderly, a problem that will only grow worse as baby boomers reach retirement.
?I don?t think older people think of HIV at all except as something affecting young people and few places are trying to build up an information base and let them know that this affects everybody. We have to understand that everybody is liable to become infected,? said Bill Rydwels, a 73-year-old man that has been living with HIV for 20 years.
The sex educators in Montgomery County, Md., have devised a film for 10th-graders that features a young lady putting a condom on a cucumber. You do wonder, when you read about these things, why they stop there.
After all, if the assumption is that kids are too stupid to know how to unroll a condom unless it is demonstrated for them, then why would they be smart enough to know that it goes on a penis and not on the contents of the vegetable bin in the refrigerator?
Government-funded researchers tested anti-HIV drugs on hundreds of foster children over the past two decades, often without providing them a basic protection afforded in federal law and required by some states, an Associated Press review has found. The research, funded by the National Institutes of Health, spanned the country. It was most widespread in the 1990s as foster care agencies sought treatments for their HIV-infected children that weren't yet available in the marketplace. The practice ensured that foster children--mostly poor or minority--received care from world-class researchers at government expense, slowing their rate of death and extending their lives. But it also exposed a vulnerable population to the risks of medical research and drugs that were known to have serious side effects in adults and for which the safety for children was unknown.
Condoms can reduce your risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, but just how effective are they? On ?Today?s Woman,? we take a look at condoms. Dr. Judith Reichman, a ?Today? contributor and gynecologist, was invited on the show to share the latest information on STDs and tips on how to prevent getting one.
In June, the Centers for Disease Control reported a new national all-time high: One million people in the United States are now HIV positive, and half of those are black.
Before the black community could recover from that startling blow, the CDC also reported that a new five-city study found 46% of all black men who sleep with men are HIV positive.
New federal rules designed to get people off the Medicaid rolls and give senior citizens Medicare prescription drug coverage are causing confusion and may make getting medications more difficult for HIV-positive people.
The new rules, known as Medicare Part D, go into effect January 1. People who need the coverage, and their case managers, are scrambling to choose from HMO-like plans before then. Anyone not enrolled in a program by January 1 will be automatically enrolled in one by Medicare, whether or not that program is right for them.
In June 2000, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), convened a workshop to evaluate the published evidence establishing the effectiveness of latex male condoms in preventing STDs, including HIV. A summary report from that workshop was completed in July 2001 (http://www.niaid.nih.gov/ dmid/stds/condomreport.pdf). This fact sheet is based on the NIH workshop report and additional studies that were not reviewed in that report or were published subsequent to the workshop (see link for additional references). Most epidemiologic studies comparing rates of STD transmission between condom users and non-users focus on penile-vaginal intercourse.
This page has statistics and studies from reputable institutions citing the effectiveness of male latex condoms. The last section addresses some common myths about condoms.
The following statistics are from the fact sheet "The Truth About Latex Condoms," developed by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS).
One out of 4 women and one out of 5 men have no knowledge about their sexual partners' history.
Two-thirds of 1,000 women age 18 to 60 knew nothing or very little about STDs (other than HIV/AIDS) in 1995.
The highest at-risk groups are adolescents and gays. African American and Hispanic women are also in the high-risk group.
The rate of unwanted pregnancies and incidence of disease is alarming...
Former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders on Monday said condoms are more likely to protect teens against sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy than vows of abstinence.
"Many of our children don't use condoms because we don't teach them about condoms," she said. "Our government tells them that condoms will break. I always say, the vows of abstinence break far more easily than latex condoms."
About 15% of incarcerated drug users at correctional facilities in the Canadian province of British Columbia reported using injection drugs during their incarceration, causing concern that prisons are contributing to the spread of HIV in Canada, according to one of two recently released studies conducted by researchers from the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, the CNS/Vancouver Sun reports.
Forty thousand Nevadans soon will receive word that they might have been exposed to HIV and hepatitis strains B and C in what a federal health official called the largest notification of its kind in U.S. history.
Patients who visited the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada at 700 Shadow Lane between March 2004 and Jan. 11 are being urged to get tested for the diseases as soon as possible.
I know the standard run-of-the-mill issues that come along with straight sex, but I'm bi, so what do I need to know about the risks that come along with gay sex?
Stereotypes and misinformation about HIV that are commonplace among the general public are also evident in a surprising number of clinical staff, a study from the University at Buffalo has found. Published in the journal AIDS Patient Care and STDs, Lance S. Rintamaki's study shows that more than 25 years after its discovery, HIV still has the power to generate a broad array of stigmatizing behavior. People infected with HIV have previously labeled dealing with stigma as the most significant social and psychological challenge of the HIV experience and Rintamaki's study shows little has changed.
An experimental anti-HIV gel is safe for women to use on a daily basis, according to researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
In testing, the gel, called tenofovir, was favorably self-applied and tolerable to non-HIV-infected women, a significant boost to HIV and AIDS prevention efforts focused on next-generation microbicides to reduce infection rates, the researchers said.
It's possible to stimulate the thymus gland to produce new immune system T-cells in adults infected with HIV, U.S. researchers say.
HIV infection destroys T-cells, which leads to the collapse of the immune system and severe infection. The thymus gland produces T-cells early in life but gradually loses function and becomes mostly inactive in adulthood. That means it's difficult for HIV-infected adults to produce new T-cells to rebuild their depleted immune systems.
Approximately one-fifth of HIV-positive patients report never using condoms with regular or casual partners in a study conducted in New York and published in the February edition of AIDS Patient Care and STDs. Inconsistent use of condoms was associated with the presence of symptoms of depression, and most of the patients reporting unprotected sex had a detectable viral load.
The first anti-AIDS vaginal gel to make it through late-stage testing failed to stop HIV infection in a study of 6,000 South African women, disappointed researchers announced Monday.
The study was marred by low use of the gel, which could have undermined results, they said. Women used it less than half the number of times they had sex, and only 10 percent said they used it every time as directed.
Ah, the swinging 60s and 70s. Those were the days. Sex was an egocentric activity engaged in, solely and indiscriminately, for pleasure.
"Spreading the love" was a humanitarian activity, not a euphemism within the medical community for the increased distribution of STDs among the population. This was all, of course, before the official discovery of AIDS by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on June 5, 1981.
The United Nations estimates that 2.5 million children are infected with HIV / AIDS, with nearly 90 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Activists in the fight against the disease say one of the best ways to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the HIV virus is to prevent unintended births. From Washington, reporter William Eagle has the story.
In recent years, anti-retroviral AIDS drugs have been in the forefront of the fight to prevent the spread of the disease from a mother to her baby.
MEXICO CITY (IPS) - The HIV/AIDS epidemic remains stable in Latin America and the Caribbean, mainly affecting high-risk groups like gay men and sex workers, according to the UNAIDS report for 2008, released Tuesday.
Last year, 140,000 new infections were reported in the region, bringing the total number of people living with HIV to 1.7 million, while 63,000 people died of AIDS-related causes in 2007.
A new study involving monkeys suggests that antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV could also protect people from getting infected with the virus. The development is being hailed by AIDS researchers. VOA's Jessica Berman reports. More than 33 million people worldwide are living with HIV. There were 2.5 million new infections last year alone.
A group working to develop a gel or cream women could use to protect themselves against the AIDS virus said on Tuesday they have permission to use an experimental new drug from Merck and Co. It is the sixth HIV drug to be tested by the International Partnership for Microbicides, said the group's chief executive officer, Dr. Zeda Rosenberg.
Last month, researchers in Atlanta launched a clinical trial to determine if the drug tenofovir, already in wide use to treat HIV/AIDS, also can be taken by uninfected people to protect them from HIV. This is the strategy we use with malaria and other diseases: We take preventative medications before we encounter pathogens, so our body can repel infection.
What is HIV? We answer the question What Is HIV? We also provide infection rates, prevention tips, how it is not transmitted, the orgin of HIV and everything you ever needed to know about HIV/AIDS.
| 
Search:
