Rising Hope for AIDS Cure

I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine a couple of years ago regarding the discovery of a genetic mutation that makes people resistant to HIV. It was an email conversation, complete with many exclamation points, a sign of the times both in communication and in the promise of a cure for AIDS in our lifetime. Now, that promise is a little closer to becoming a reality.

According to ABC News, a 46-year-old man named Timothy Brown, diagnosed with AIDS, received a transplant of blood stem cells to treat leukemia in 2007. The adult blood donor had this HIV-resistant gene mutation. Brown is now the only person in the world to be cured of AIDS. But there will be more.

According to Dr. Lawrence Petz, the medical director for the umbilical cord blood bank StemCyte, the process is complicated by the fact that this HIV-resistant mutation is very rare, with fewer than 1 percent of Caucasians having it, and even fewer individuals of other races. Brown's transplant involved a very close donor match. However, umbilical cord blood doesn't require as close of a match. But it does require the rare mutation and Petz and his colleagues have only discovered 102 umbilical cord blood samples in 17,000 tested that contain it.

Within the past few weeks, an HIV-infected patient received a cord blood transplant. Another is planned later this year. It will take months to know if these patients will see an impact from the transplants as Brown did. But Petz is hopeful. He says that the cure can happen. It's just a matter of time.

I believe that the promise is much brighter with this advancement. I believe, as Petz and Brown believe, that there will be a cure for AIDS, for all people suffering from AIDS. It may take a bit longer to come, but it is happening. And that's a wonderful thing. A hopeful thing.

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FDA delays decision on first drug to prevent HIV

Federal health regulators have delayed a decision on whether to approve the first pill shown to prevent HIV infection, the drug's manufacturer says.

Gilead Sciences disclosed Friday that the Food and Drug Administration will take three more months to review its application for Truvada, after the company submitted additional materials to the agency earlier this month.

In May, a panel of experts recommended approval of the daily pill for healthy people who are at high risk of contracting HIV, including gay and bisexual men. The vote was nonbinding, though the FDA often follows the group's advice.

Gilead said it submitted updated information on its planned safety materials for patients and doctors using the drug. The FDA typically extends its reviews after receiving such information.

The FDA is now expected to rule by Sept. 14, the company said in a statement.

Gilead Sciences Inc., based in Foster City, Calif., has marketed Truvada since 2004 as a treatment for people who are infected with the virus. The medication is a combination of two older HIV drugs, Emtriva and Viread.

Truvada made headlines in 2010, when government researchers showed it could actually prevent people from contracting HIV when used as a precautionary measure. A three-year study found that daily doses cut the risk of infection in healthy gay and bisexual men by 42 percent, when accompanied by condoms and counseling. Last year another study found that Truvada reduced infection by 75 percent in heterosexual couples in which one partner was infected with HIV and the other was not.

An estimated 1.2 million Americans have HIV, which develops into AIDS unless treated with antiviral drugs. AIDS causes the body's immune system to break down, leading to infections which are eventually fatal. Gay and bisexual men account for the majority of cases

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Revealed: Secret of HIV's natural born killers

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Superbug gonorrhea spreading across Europe

Reuters – Mon, Jun 11, 2012 LONDON (Reuters) - "Superbug" strains of gonorrhea which are becoming untreatable accounted for almost one in 10 cases of the sexually transmitted disease in Europe in 2010, more than double the rate of the year before, health officials said on Monday.

The drug-resistant strains are also spreading fast across the continent, officials warned. They were found in 17 European countries in 2010, seven more than in the previous year.

Gonorrhea was the second most common sexually transmitted infection (STI) in Europe in 2010, with more than 32,000 infections, data from the Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) showed.

Even though chlamydia was the most frequently reported STI, with more than 345,000 cases, the ECDC's director singled out gonorrhea as presenting a "critical situation".

Marc Sprenger said the increase in cases of superbug strains meant there was a risk gonorrhea may become an untreatable disease in the near future.

The proportion of gonorrhea cases with resistance to the antibiotic recommended to treat the disease, cefixime, rose from 4 percent in 2009 to 9 percent in 2010.

The ECDC report follows a warning from the World Health Organisation that virtually untreatable forms of drug-resistant gonorrhea were spreading around the world.

Gonorrhea is a bacterial infection which, if left untreated, can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancies, stillbirths, severe eye infections in babies, and infertility in men and women.

VIGILANT

It is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the world and is most prevalent in South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

In the United States alone, the number of cases is estimated at about 700,000 a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The emergence of drug-resistant gonorrhea is caused by unregulated access to and overuse of antibiotics, which help fuel genetic mutations within the bacteria.

"Public health experts and clinicians need to be aware of the current critical situation and should be vigilant for treatment failures," Sprenger said in a statement.

Experts say the best way to reduce the risk of even greater resistance developing - beyond the urgent need to develop new drugs - is to rapidly and accurately diagnose the disease and then treat it with combinations of two or more types of antibiotics at the same time.

This technique is used in the treatment of some other infections like tuberculosis in an attempt to make it more difficult for the bacteria to learn how to overcome the drugs.

The ECDC's sexually transmitted infections report covered data and trends on five STIs - syphilis, congenital syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia and lymphogranuloma venereum (LGV) - in the EU and European Economic Area from 1990 to 2010.

It found diverging trends in sexually transmitted diseases across Europe, with a rapidly increasing trend for chlamydia and slightly decreasing trends for gonorrhea and syphilis.

Genital chlamydia infections are caused by Chlamydia trachomatis bacteria which can irreversibly damage a woman's reproductive organs.

Although the disease is easily treated with antibiotics, infections can remain undiagnosed because many patients - 70 percent of women and 50 percent of men - have no symptoms and so are unaware they are carrying and passing on the infection.

(Editing by Pravin Char)

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Study Digs Into Secrets of Keeping HIV in Check

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HIV may have returned in 'cured' patient: scientists

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Birth Control Linked to Heart Attack, Stroke

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Contraceptive pill, ring tied to higher stroke risk

Reuters – 6 hrs ago NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The largest study to examine the risks of hormone-based birth control has concluded the contraceptives carry a small risk of stroke and heart attack, depending on the method and type of hormone used.

But the risk for individual women remains extremely low, particularly in younger women.

Danish researchers wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that the findings suggest a higher risk of stroke in particular for women using vaginal rings, and possibly hormonal skin patches -- though the second finding was based on a smaller group of women and could have been due to chance.

Dr. James Simon, a women's health researcher at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. told Reuters Health other factors -- such as the belief that a patch or a ring might be safer for women thought to be at risk -- may explain the higher rate of stroke in that group.

Simon, who wasn't involved in the new research, said the findings probably shouldn't change how doctors prescribe birth control. The risks seen in the study, he said, pale in comparison to the risks of stroke, heart attack or death faced by women who get pregnant.

"None of the hormonal contraceptives studied

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Birth Control That Uses Combined Hormones Raises Heart Risk: Study

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Sleep Apnea Treatment Might Boost Men's Sex Lives

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Heavy Drinking, Smoking Won't Harm Men's Sperm: Study

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Sleep Habits in U.S. Vary by Race, Native Country: Study

HealthDay – 4 mins 40 secs ago WEDNESDAY, June 13 (HealthDay News) -- Race, ethnicity and country of origin appear to be factors in how much sleep Americans get each night, according to two new studies.

In one report, State University of New York researchers examined data from 400,000 participants in the U.S. National Health Interview Surveys between 2004 and 2010 and found that those born in the United States were more likely to report sleeping longer than the recommended seven to nine hours each night.

Previous research has found that adults who regularly sleep less or more than the recommended seven to nine hours may be at increased risk for health problems such as cardiovascular disease, stroke and depression.

In comparison, African-born Americans were more likely to report sleeping six hours or less per night, and Indian-born Americans were more likely to report sleeping six to eight hours a night.

However, foreign-born Americans were less likely than U.S.-born Americans to report getting too little or too much sleep after the researchers adjusted for the effects of age, sex, education, income, smoking, alcohol use, body mass index and emotional distress.

In the other study, researchers randomly selected 439 adults in Chicago and found that whites slept significantly longer than other racial/ethnic groups, blacks reported the worst sleep quality, and Asians were most likely to report daytime sleepiness.

"These racial/ethnic differences in sleep persisted even following statistical adjustment for cardiovascular disease risk factors that we already know to be associated with poor sleep, such as body mass index, high blood pressure and diabetes," study lead author Mercedes Carnethon, of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, said in an American Academy of Sleep Medicine news release.

"And we excluded participants who had evidence of mild to moderate sleep apnea. Consequently, these differences in sleep are not attributable to underlying sleep disorders but represent the sleep experience of a 'healthy' subset of the population," she added.

The studies were to be presented Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Boston. Because this study was presented at a medical meeting, the data and conclusions should be viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute offers strategies for getting enough sleep.

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