HIV Testing Blog

Any development that accounts for more deaths of people who would otherwise be alive at the end of 2009 as they were at the start of the year should by all accounts be the overwhelming choice for the year’s top news story.
Forget about transitory political issues (though those issues impact on Swaziland’s ability to cope with the AIDS crisis), the parade of personalities (mostly the notorious individuals who garner attention through scandal or venality) and the trumpeting of programmes devoted to this and that, even the dire economic news of 2009 has had far less life and death impact on Swazis as HIV and AIDS.
How many people died of AIDS in Swaziland this year?  No one knows.  The taboo persists about the disease.  Despite the national emergency, essential data does not exist.
Testing is still voluntary, though some dissenting voices were raised against this long-standing policy which remains sound human rights policy (privacy as manifested in the desire to be ignorant of one’s medical condition is a human right) if disastrous public health policy.
The way things have worked has been called into question this year.  In South Africa, the government of Jacob Zuma reversed the Mbeki-era approach toward AIDS.
In Swaziland the biggest AIDS-related development of 2009 was the meteoric interest in male circumcision.
Critics called the upswing in the numbers of young men undergoing the procedure as safe sex avoidance, but medical practitioners who did the procedures insisted that all patients were adequately counseled that MC was one part of the HIV-avoidance package, and not in itself a 100% avoidance tool.
This was the year that the first clinic devoted to men was opened in Swaziland, the Letsemba Letfu Clinic in Matsapha.
Even before the clinic was officially opened, 1 000 young men had visited to undergo the procedure.  Each day 35 patients are circumcised by appointment, with ‘walk in’ patients handled as well.
There is no charge for the procedure.  Importantly, 92% of patients who underwent MC also took an HIV test.
Global Warming was 2009’s top environmental issue, climaxed by this month’s Copenhagen Summit, and the topic even had ramifications for HIV and AIDS.
Researchers calculated that global warming would threaten crop production in areas where there were a large number of people living with HIV and AIDS; generally poorer countries whose HIV-positive population segments would have their ARV treatments compromised if they failed to obtain enough food for proper nutrition.
Tuberculosis received the attention of an emergency regional summit in October here in Swaziland because of TB’s link to HIV and AIDS – the disease is the primary opportunistic disease affecting people living with HIV and AIDS, both here and throughout Southern Africa.
So serious has the growth of tuberculosis in Swaziland, a disease once close to being vanquished in our country until the advent of AIDS, that health officials are now calling TB and AIDS ‘a dual epidemic.’
“When you look at the history of TB in Southern Africa you see that it was considered a very serious disease in the 1950s but seemed to be under control by the 1980s.  But with the arrival of HIV and AIDS, TB rates have really gone out of control,” said Dr. Alan Whiteside, Executive Director of HEARD at the University of KwaZulu Natal told AIDS LIFELINE.
Médecins San Frontiéres Head of Mission in Swaziland Aymeric Peguillan told conference delegates, “The Kingdom of Swaziland is in the midst of an HIV/TB epidemic.  The management of the co-epidemic represents the country’s most serious health-related challenge.”
2009 was a typical year in that once again individuals announced they had discovered the AIDS ‘cure.’  And also as usual, they were not qualified researchers and sought not to share with humanity but to sell to desperate people living with AIDS their potions.
NERCHA and the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare more than once had to remind the public that, sadly, there is no AIDS cure.
However, progress was made in 2009 toward an AIDS vaccine, the Holy Grail of research into the prevention of HIV infections.  Trials in Thailand proved promising.
Much work has to be done before the vaccine is available, but for the first time such words as ‘never’ and ‘impossible’ have been dropped from medical discussion on the subject of a possible AIDS vaccine.
For Swaziland, such an AIDS preventative would be a life saver, because 2009 repeated the history of all previous years of the AIDS epidemic in one important respect: no measurable change was found in people’s sexual behaviour modification. AIDS remained a preventable disease in 2009.  That did not change.  Nor in any appreciable way did people’s sex lives change according to various surveys.
Prevention remains a person’s the best hope to avoid AIDS.  However, all efforts to inspire people on a large scale to look after themselves again fell short in 2009.
But the year was not without its accomplishments, from the stream of young men seeking male circumcision to wider debate of sexual matters once considered taboo – even though the greatest taboo unfortunately remains, the reluctance of most people to recognise the reality of HIV in themselves and their loved ones.

For the complete article, please refer to The Swazi Observer.

Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa, announced that the country will attempt to supply treatment for all HIV-positive children. South Africa carries the highest rate of HIV-positive people of all countries in the world with more than one in ten citizens currently diagnosed with HIV. According to researchers HIV usually affects those in their childbearing ages, and more than 2.4 million children have been left stranded by HIV so far. According to Ivor Chipkin, chief research specialist at the Human Sciences Research Council in Tshwane, 32 percent of all young South Africans will have lost at least one of their parents to HIV by year 2015.

Many people blame the policies of the former South Africa President, Thabo Mbeki, for the widespread AIDS epidemic in the country. Mbeki often disputed the link between HIV and AIDS and was against the widespread distribution of antiretroviral medications. Instead he encouraged HIV-positive people to eat garlic and beet roots, and to drink lemon juice to deter HIV. People believe that Mbeki’s attitudes and actions could have contributed to as many as 330,000 early deaths.

President Zuma, who was the Vice President to Mbeki, is trying to lengthen the gap between his and his predecessor’s policies. South Africa offers anti-retroviral (ARV) treatments to 700,000 HIV patients, over double the 216,000 patients from last year. At roughly $1,500 a year for each treatment it can get a bit pricey. Fortunately, foreign donors have often provided treatments free of charge, and the US ambassador to South Africa has announced that the United States will contribute another $120 million for next year’s AIDS treatment and research.

* For the complete article, please visit http://stdtestingblog.com/original-articles/

A former teacher from South Carolina has been charged with three counts first-degree criminal sexual conduct.  The judge also ordered the teacher, Joel L. Bedenbaugh, to register as a sex offender.

Bedenbaugh was sentenced to six years in prison for not telling his ex-wife, to whom he was married for five years, that he had HIV.  This exposed her to possible infection.  Instead, he told her that the medicine that he took was for a blood disease.  She remains uninfected.

It is illegal to knowingly engage in sexual intercourse with another person without first informing them of an HIV infection.

In 2006, Bedenbaugh was convicted for  inappropriate contact with a 13-year-old girl in November 2006.  More recently, in 2008, he was investigated for  an alleged sexual assault on a juvenile in 2008.  This brought about attention to his medical history, which indicated that he had HIV.

For the original article, please refer to original articles.

Lisa Madigan, Illinois Attorney General, filed a lawsuit against the Center for AIDS Prevention in July. The center is accused of unlawful fundraising and falsifying documents. Their registration was revoked 20 years ago, according to Madigan, but they have continued to accept donations throughout the state. If the Attorney General is successful, they could seize money raised at the center, ban members of the center from future charity work, and force them to pay back donations among other repercussions. The most extreme punishment would be shutting down the center once and for all by “revoking its corporate status.”

*For the complete article, please visit http://hivtestingblog.com/original-articles/

Ozzy Osbourne received a false positive test for HIV a number of years back, and claims he was devastated by the news when the original result came back positive.

“I went to the doctor and had an AIDS test and he told me it was positive,” he said, in an interview in this month’s Glamour magazine. “That was one of the worst days of my life.”

The doctor did a confirmatory test, which came back negative.  The doctor attributed the results first test, the false positive, to the heavy drinking and drug-taking lifestyle he used to enjoy tampering with his immune system.

“It turned out that because I was drinking and using drugs so much, my immune system had dropped so that it was a borderline result. When I went back to be tested again it was negative.”

It is also believed that Ozzy’s daughter Kelly referred to him when she broke down at an AIDS charity benefit in London two years ago.

“This charity is really important to me because one of my family is HIV positive,” she said at the time. “And I’m so proud of him.”

Ozzy is currently promoting his autobiography, I Am Ozzy, and many revelations have come out about his life, including the news that he still enjoys conjugal trysts with wife Sharon but struggles to bring the liaisons to a satisfactory conclusion.

*For the original article, please refer to http://www.hivtestingblog.com/original-articles/

First time in local police history for charge under 1994 state law

A Clarksville woman was arrested Thursday.  She was charged with knowingly exposing a man to HIV.

The woman, Donyel Da’Shawn Brown, was charged with criminal exposure to HIV, and her bond was set at $1 million.

The arrest warrant states a man reported Brown knowingly had unprotected sex with him for four years without telling him she was infected.

Also, Brown and the man had a child during the time she was diagnosed with HIV, the warrant said, but has not been determined if the child has HIV. Whether the child and man were infected has not been determined, Knoll said.

The state law, which took effect in 1994, does not require “the actual transmission of HIV” for someone to be convicted. Brown can be acquitted if she can prove that her partner had prior knowledge of her HIV status.

If convicted, Brown could face jail time of three to six years.

For the complete article, please refer to www.hivtestingblog.com/original-articles/

India became the first country in Asia to implement the DNA Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test. The test, which uses a dry blood sampling method could possibly save the lives of many children, particularly those under 18 months of age. The HIV DNA PCR test is a very efficient and convenient way of diagnosing children born to an HIV infected mother. It requires no icing or cold-chain equipment, but rather just a few drops of the child’s blood blotted on a piece of paper. Once this is done the paper can be transported to a testing facility and results are available as early as 16 hours later.

Early diagnosis can help get these children onto a treatment plan, which at a young age can prove the difference between “surviving and thriving”. If a child born to an HIV infected mother, the first HIV DNA PCR test is performed at 6 weeks of age. If that PCR test returns a positive result it is repeated for a confirmation. If the PCR test returns a negative result the first time around, a confirmation PCR test is to be performed at 6 months of age. These new developments in testing and treatment options could possibly save many, many young lives.

*For the complete article please visit http://hivtestingblog.com/original-articles/

Gorillas have been found, for the first time, to be a source of HIV.

Previous research had shown the HIV-1 strain, the main source of human infections, with 33m cases worldwide, originated from a virus in chimpanzees.

But researchers have now discovered an HIV infection in a Cameroonian woman which is clearly linked to a gorilla strain, Nature Medicine reports.

A researcher told the BBC that, though it was a new type of HIV, current drugs might still help combat its effects.

A 62-year-old woman living in Paris tested positive for a new strain of HIV. Before this, it was thought that all strains of HIV-1 were passed to humans by chimpanzees; however, this new strain is thought to have derived from gorillas.

The woman, originally from the capital of Cameroon, Yaounde, tested positive for HIV in 2004 and has not yet shown any signs of AIDS. How she contracted this new strain of HIV is still unknown. The woman claims to have had no encounters with live gorillas or bushmeat.

This new discovery presents many new questions, and also other possibilities that have been investigated before. How many people are infected with this new strain is hard to tell, but researchers will definitely be looking into possibly even more strains of HIV.

*For the complete article, please visit http://hivtestingblog.com/original-articles/

A new strain of the virus that causes AIDS has been discovered in a woman from the African nation of Cameroon.
It differs from the three known strains of human immunodeficiency virus and appears to be closely related to a form of simian virus recently discovered in wild gorillas, researchers report in Monday’s edition of the journal Nature Medicine.
The finding “highlights the continuing need to watch closely for the emergence for new HIV variants, particularly in western central Africa,” said the researchers, led by Jean-Christophe Plantier of the University of Rouen, France.
The three previously known HIV strains are related to the simian virus that occurs in chimpanzees.
The most likely explanation for the new find is gorilla-to-human transmission, Plantier’s team said. But they added they cannot rule out the possibility that the new strain started in chimpanzees and moved into gorillas and then humans, or moved directly from chimpanzees to both gorillas and humans.
The 62-year-old patient tested positive for HIV in 2004, shortly after moving to Paris from Cameroon, according to the researchers. She had lived near Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, but said she had no contact with apes or bush meat, a name often given to meat from wild animals in tropical countries.
The woman currently shows no signs of AIDS and remains untreated, though she still carries the virus, the researchers said.
How widespread this strain is remains to be determined. Researchers said it could be circulating unnoticed in Cameroon or elsewhere. The virus’ rapid replication indicates that it is adapted to human cells, the researchers reported.
Their research was supported by the French Health Watch Institute, the French National Agency for Research on AIDS and Viral Hepatitis and Rouen University Hospital.
A separate paper, also in Nature Medicine, reports that people with genital herpes remain at increased risk of HIV infection even after the herpes sores have healed and the skin appears normal.
Researchers led by Drs. Lawrence Corey and Jia Zhu of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center found that long after the areas where the herpes sores existed seem to be clear, they still have immune-cell activity that can encourage HIV infection.
Herpes is marked by recurring outbreaks and has been associated with higher rates of infection with HIV. It had been thought that the breaks in the skin were the reason for higher HIV rates, but a study last year found that treatment of herpes with drugs did not reduce the HIV risk.
The researchers tested the skin of herpes patients for several weeks after their sores had healed and found that, compared with other genital skin, from twice to 37 times more immune cells remained at the locations where the sores had been.
HIV targets immune cells and in laboratory tests the virus reproduced three to five times faster in tissue from the healed sites as in tissue from other areas.
“Understanding that even treated (herpes) infections provide a cellular environment conducive to HIV infection suggests new directions for HIV prevention research,” commented Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.
That study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Tietze Foundation.

For the complete article, please refer to http://news.aol.com/health/article/new-hiv-strain-discovered-in-cameroon/599611

Making existing interventions more effective is the next step in addressing the AIDS pandemic, according to noted physician, author, and teacher Paul Farmer.

“I’m surprised at the ineffectiveness of social projects,” he told an audience of more than 400 Thursday at the Clinton Presidential Center. “They are not focused on the outcome.”

Farmer, the incoming chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University, said the world has progressed beyond a “low point” of the AIDS epidemic in 2002 when average drug costs were more than $10,000 per patient annually. “This was the time when people were saying not a lot could be done,” Farmer said.

Since then, the cost of AIDS drugs has declined dramatically. In addition, inroads have been made in Haiti, where the proportion of the population infected with HIV has dropped from 5 percent to 2 percent.

Farmer also called for renewed efforts to address other health crises around the world, singling out tuberculosis and infant mortality. “These are overwhelming problems, but they’re problems that have solutions as well,” Farmer said.

Farmer, the subject of the biography “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” also described his time practicing medicine in Haiti and Rwanda.

“He defined service and outcomes the way I’ve tried to for years,” said Skip Rutherford, dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas. “To have someone like Paul Farmer is a thrill to everyone.”

Female condoms have played a large role in women protecting themselves against HIV for many years, and at the 12th National AIDS Conference the new FC2 Female Condom was promoted as a key role in Thailand’s HIV prevention strategy.

The FC Female Condom has been on the market since 1988; however, users have voiced their complaints about the product including it’s difficulty to use, noise, and it being uncomfortable. In response to these complaints manufacturers developed the FC2 Female Condom, which is made of nitrile rubber creating a more comfortable use.

Thailand has had a longstanding battle with HIV, and although they studied the use of female condoms for use in their HIV/AIDS plan in 1990 the studies were halted last year with no results. Production of female condoms has increased by as much as 14 million in the past four years and are currently distributed in 90 million countries, but due to importation costs the FC2 has not been made accessible in Thailand.

According to Tisssadee Sawangying, a health coordinator who took part in the National AIDS Conference, “the government should work hard to increase alternative options for women to protect themselves from HIV/AIDS infection.” Having an option such as the FC2 available for women in Thailand and all over the world would greatly increase their options when it comes to protecting themselves.

*For the complete article, please visit http://hivtestingblog.com/original-articles

By 2030, an estimated 50 million people with HIV/AIDS will need newer treatments to keep them alive, according an all-party parliamentary report due out this week. To prevent millions of AIDS deaths in poor countries, pharmaceutical firms holding patents on HIV/AIDS drugs should release these drugs’ patent rights, Mike Foster, Britain’s international development minister, is expected to say.

Under the proposal, drug companies could put their HIV/AIDS drugs into a “patent pool,” and generic-drug makers would be permitted to make cheaper copies and combination pills for patients in poor nations. Unitaid, an international drug-buying entity set by up several donor countries including the United Kingdom, is trying to create the pool. However, drug firms regard patents as the means of recouping the massive costs of drug research and development.

Three million HIV/AIDS patients in poor countries now receive subsidized treatment, but that is just one-third of those in need. Drug resistance is a growing threat in both the developing and developed nations, and the newer treatments are expensive. Cheap, generic copies of these newer drugs cannot easily be made by generic-drug makers in places such as India and China, which now have tighter intellectual property-rights rules.

“The pharmaceutical industry has an opportunity to act now to help prevent future human catastrophe,” said Foster. “It is time for them to state their clear commitments to make HIV medicines affordable to those who need them most.”

“We are sitting on a treatment time bomb,” said Member of Parliament David Barrow, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on AIDS. “We cannot sleepwalk into a situation where we can only afford to treat a tiny proportion of those infected.”

For the complete article, please refer to http://www.aegis.com/todaysnews/du.asp

Today the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria announced its latest prevention and treatment numbers, noting in particular that Global Fund-financed programs have put 2.3 million people on treatment for HIV/AIDS, 5.4 million people have been treated for tuberculosis, and 88 million insecticide-treated nets have been distributed to prevent malaria infection. In addition, more than 500,000 HIV-positive pregnant women have been treated to prevent their babies from being born with HIV.

These latest results strengthen evidence that investments during the past five years have resulted in the most significant progress ever achieved in the global fight against these three diseases. Recent evidence suggests that global mortality from tuberculosis is now declining, AIDS mortality among adults in several high-burden countries in Africa is declining, and malaria elimination efforts have made tremendous progress, with reductions in the number of cases and malaria-related child mortality falling between 50% and 80% in a growing number of countries.

Together, AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria kill about six million people per year. With grants worth $16 billion in 140 countries around the world, the Global Fund has become the world’s leading global public health financier.

For the full article, please refer to http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/156875.php

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the tuberculosis (TB) vaccine is of great risks to HIV-infected infants, Tanzanian local daily the Guardian reported on Thursday.

Through its research published in the International Public Health journal, the WHO noted that HIV-infected infants risked contracting a deadly form of tuberculosis from the Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine instead of receiving protection against the disease, the report quoted a WHO statement issued on Wednesday in Dar es Salaam as saying.

For the complete article, please refer to http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-07/02/content_11641405.htm.

BOSTON — In an effort to reduce AIDS rates in Massachusetts, state public health officials recommended that everyone 13 and older get HIV-tested as part of their routine medical care.

The goal is to make HIV screening as common as cholesterol tests and blood pressure monitoring. That way, HIV infections could be treated immediately, before they progress to full-blown AIDS.

Currently, about a third of people in Massachusetts with HIV develop AIDS within two months of diagnosis. Lauren Smith, medical director at the state Department of Public Health, says that number is too high.

“That tells us that, in fact, they were infected with HIV probably for many years — possibly a decade,” says Smith, “and suggests that we lost many opportunities to intervene and provide them very effective care that can ensure that they live longer and healthier.”

Smith also says the state’s health care system could save money if HIV is detected and treated earlier. HIV testing remains voluntary in the state and is free at many doctors’ offices and health clinics.

“It would be rolled into routine clinical care,” says Smith. “That’s why we screen for cholesterol, that’s why we take people’s blood pressure — it’s because we can do something very effective about it. Similarly, we need to screen everyone for HIV because we have effective treatments that can make a big difference in this condition.”

For the complete article, please refer to http://www.wbur.org/2009/06/25/hiv-testing.

International migrant workers, foreign students and political refugees are often endangered by laws that discriminate against people with AIDS, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch reported last week.
The report describes how guest workers from poor countries like the Philippines and Sri Lanka working in wealthy ones like Saudi Arabia may be given mandatory H.I.V. testing — sometimes without their knowledge — and deported, often without being able to claim back wages and sometimes after imprisonment without treatment.
For the complete article, please see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/health/23glob.html?_r=1.

The 2009 Global TB control report reveals that one out of four TB deaths is HIV-related, twice as many as previously recognized. In 2007, there were an estimated 1.37 million new cases of tuberculosis among HIV-infected people and 456 000 deaths.

“These findings point to an urgent need to find, prevent and treat tuberculosis in people living with HIV and to test for HIV in all patients with TB in order to provide prevention, treatment and care. Countries can only do that through stronger collaborative programmes and stronger health systems that address both diseases,” said Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO.

For the complete article, see http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2009/tuberculosis_report_20090324/en/index.html.

President Obama asked Congress on Tuesday to spend $63 billion over the next six years on a new, broader global health strategy that would reshape one of the signature foreign policy efforts of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Mr. Bush made combating global AIDS a centerpiece of his foreign agenda. The program he created — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or Pepfar — is regarded as one of his most significant achievements. But the plan Mr. Obama outlined Tuesday envisions a more…

”We cannot simply confront individual preventable illnesses in isolation,” the president said in a statement released by the White House that cited the swine flu outbreak as an example. ”The world is interconnected, and that demands an integrated approach to global health.”

For the complete article, see http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9504E5D81538F935A35756C0A96F9C8B63