AIDS/HIV
tsmith | August 22, 2006 The International AIDS conference is barely over, but already it's getting results when it comes to working against stigma and combatting denial--and is receiving help from one U.S. politician. Stories after the fold...
First, from Buisness Day comes harsh words for South Africa's leaders:
Former International AIDS Society president Mark Wainberg has launched a blistering attack on the South African government for failing to contain the country's HIV epi demic, widely acknowledged to be one of the world's worst.
Describing the government as "obtuse, dilatory and negligent" on the treatment…
tsmith | August 19, 2006Razib over at Gene Expression has an excellent post* about cultural issues affecting HIV and circumcision, elaborating on Lindsay's mention here of the limitations of trying to increase circumcision as a way to reduce viral spread:
There was a strong undercurrent of resistance to the approach throughout the session. It finally erupted during the question period. One man asked the panelists whether they considered circumcision a form of mutilation, and what kind of counseling or support services they would put in place to offset the traumatic effects of the surgery? When Auvert pointed out…
tsmith | August 19, 2006One catchphrase that permeated the conference this past week was "scaling up." I just want to wrap up my posting here with a brief discussion of what that is, and what that means as far as HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment.
Readers who are scientists or who have some kind of science background will probably be famililar with the concept of a "pilot study." This is a study, generally small in scale, where new ideas are tested, and preliminary data are gathered. For example, a pilot study looking at how the ABCs of prevention work may take 100 individuals and split them into two groups: 50…
tsmith | August 18, 2006As the conference wraps up, I just want to be sure to point you to some other areas where AIDS is being covered on ScienceBlogs.
Every week, our Seed overlords pose a question to us (originally titled, "Ask a ScienceBlogger.") This week's question is:
To what extent do you worry about AIDS, either with respect to yourself, your children, or the world at large?...
You can find the collection of responses here.
In more basic science, Sandra of Discovering Biology in a Digital World is starting a series on using HIV to prove some points about evolution. Looks like a great start to the series;…
tsmith | August 18, 2006I mentioned yesterday that one way to help prevent new HIV infections is to treat people who are infected with herpes, another sexually-transmittted virus that infects as much as 20% of the population in the United States. That may seem odd; how does treating one viral infection prevent infection with a second virus?
Studies have shown that, generally, HIV isn't one of the more highly infectious viruses out there. For example, the hepatitis B and C viruses are transmitted via many of the same routes as HIV (such as sexual activity shared needles), but vary in their infectivity. If, for…
tsmith | August 17, 2006 If one thing has been hammered home this week (and, indeed, over the past 25 years) regarding HIV/AIDS, it's that prevention is key. Treatments, while improving, are still a distant second place to preventing primary infection as far as the fight against AIDS goes, and a large portion of the world's HIV-infected population still has no access to these treatments. Prevention, therefore, is critical. And while the condom has become the symbol for HIV prevention, strategies go far beyond that tool.
Over at WebMD, they have a nice summary of many of the key points from this week's…
tsmith | August 17, 2006This week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine contains two articles on AIDS that are available free of charge.
The first article, Changing the Paradigm for HIV Testing -- The End of Exceptionalism, goes over content I blogged about here, discussing moving toward a more universal testing paradigm. The article focuses on issues specifically in the United States, but certainly many of the points have broad applicability.
The second article, AIDS in 2006 -- Moving toward One World, One Hope? is a broad overview of the lessons learned and problems still faced regarding HIV therapy…
tsmith | August 16, 2006Ran across this interesting article in New Scientist on natural resistance to HIV.
Researchers are launching a project to discover how certain people, dubbed "elite controllers", are successfully able to fend off the HIV virus without using drugs.
More and more cases of such people - also known as "elite suppressors" - are coming to light. Unlike the sex workers in Kenya identified a decade ago as being HIV-negative despite their constant exposure to the virus, elite controllers are infected, and do develop antibodies to the virus, but at a very, very low level.
More over at AIDS at 25.
tsmith | August 16, 2006 In the United States, approximately a third of those who are HIV-positive don't even realize it. Worldwide, that number can be much higher. Because of this, and because those who don't know their HIV status can play a large role in continuing to spread the virus, in recent years, there has been an increased push for more universal HIV testing, in order to decrease this percentage unaware of their HIV status, and theoretically, reduce spread of the virus. But is this a good idea, and how exactly would and should it be accomplished? This was the topic of discussion at a session titled…
tsmith | August 15, 2006I've blogged previously about the massive effect vaccines against the human papilloma virus (HPV) could have. HPV is a common sexually-transmitted virus. Though most strains are harmless, a few have the potential to cause cervical cancer. Therefore, the HPV vaccine will be the first one ever specifically intended to prevent a type of cancer.
This vaccine has recently been approved by the FDA, and is set to roll out shortly. This is already expected to be a rather contentious issue as the vaccine is rolled out in the U.S. and elsewhere, as one target group for vaccination is adolescents…
tsmith | August 14, 2006 To use my earlier post on stigma as a jumping-off point, there was a session today titled Religion and New Leadership: the Challenge to Deliver (video available at the link). Speakers included religious leaders from a variety of religious and cultural backgrounds, discussing the role they play in working to control the AIDS epidemic. It was noted that churches haven't completely come to the reality that people living with HIV/aids aren't just a "they;" but that they're also members of their churches, mosques, synagogues, etc. It was emphasized that this sense of people living with HIV…
tsmith | August 14, 2006While Lindsay give the quote of the night to Bill Gates and much of the coverage in the press this morning focuses on his talk of microbicides, his wife Melinda spent much of her time discussing the stigma that comes with being diagnosed with HIV. She discussed how political figures won't accompany her when she goes out to discuss the virus with sex workers, and how many women in AIDS hospices have been abandoned even by their own families.
Stigma makes it easier for political leaders to stand in the way of saving lives....This is a serious obstacle to ending AIDS. In the fight against…
tsmith | August 13, 2006If I could have been at this week's conference for one session, it would have been this morning's symposium on AIDS denial and responsible journalism. Hannah has already mentioned it and given her impressions and thoughts. The session itself was moderated by HIV researcher Daniel Kuritzkes and journalist Laurie Garrett, currently a Senior Fellow on Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. Talks were also given by HIV researcher John Moore, South Africa-based science journalist Tamar Khan, Toronto Star science reporter Kim Honey, and Nathan Geffen of the Treatment Action Campaign…
tsmith | August 11, 2006As y'all may or may not be aware, the XVI International AIDS Conference begins this weekend in Toronto. For those of you who read Seed magazine, you've seen that the current issue focuses on "AIDS at 25," and they also have an online summary here. As a matter of fact, myself, a Seed journalist, and a freelance science writer will be blogging the conference at a temporary blog this coming week; myself remotely from Iowa, and the others live from Toronto. So while AIDS will be at the forefront of this blog for a few days, I also have some posts on tap about other issues in infectious disease…
tsmith | August 1, 2006Regular readers may recall me previously discussing Rebecca Culshaw (for reference, threads can be found here and here). She's a PhD mathematician who wrote two articles discussing her departure from her prior research, which focused on mathematical models of HIV infection. I pointed out in one comment that her training is in math, and not biology, and that from her articles, she showed a very poor understanding of not only basic biological techniques (such as the polymerase chain reaction) but infectious disease epidemiology in general. Other HIV deniers responded that, because she did…
tsmith | July 24, 2006Evolutionary biologists sometimes think we microbiology people have it easy. "No one doubts the germ theory!," they claim.
Au contraire, mes amis:
Do some research Tara. Then you will be ready to start from scratch again, forget the germ theory nonsense and become a real scientist.
And I bet this insult will sound familiar to many used to dealing with the anti-science brigades:
Evidence is all around and you have as much evidence as I do. The sole difference between you and me is that you are still blindfolded by a century of dogmatic thinking and are not able to see the evidence.
You…
tsmith | June 16, 2006Welcome to the June edition of Animalcules! Apologies for the lateness; I only had a few minutes to get online yesterday, and that was mainly devoted to checking email and making sure there were no crises that needed my attention. So, without further ado...
From the Scientific Creative Quarterly comes a humorous entry: Prokaryotes of America Unite. Almost makes me feel bad. (You also may want to check out Scientific Creative Quarterly editor David Ng's new blog here at Scienceblogs: The World's Fair.
Jennifer over at Science Matters has a nice post discussing background information on…
tsmith | June 9, 2006I wrote recently how evolution and phylogenetic analysis of HIV isolates has provided evidence that the progenitor to HIV jumped into humans in Cameroon or a nearby area. Obviously it's a topic that's interesting to me, but may seem a bit esoteric to some. RPM over at Evolgen has a new post showing another application of phylogenetic analysis to HIV that may be of interest to readers here, where infectious disease epidemiology meets CSI.
tsmith | June 7, 2006 A recent story detailing an outbreak of sexually-transmitted diseases has gotten a good deal of attention from news outlets and blogs. The reason it's newsworthy is because the individuals affected aren't teenagers or single twenty-somethings; they're senior citizens. So, let me point out the obvious: even "old people" have sex.
This sometimes uncomfortable fact of life was driven home to me when I was just a teenager myself, when my grandma was discussing the difficulty she had showering (she'd just had surgery). Someone had asked whether grandpa was much help, and she mentioned that…