HIV drug resistance creeps higher: WHO

"World Health Organization AIDS Chief Gottfried Himschall speaks during an interview with AFP in Washington, DC on July 9. Drug resistance to HIV medicines has been creeping higher in parts of Africa and Asia but is not steep enough to cause alarm, said a survey released by the World Health Organization. (AFP Photo/Jim Watson)" title

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AIDS deaths worldwide drop as access to drugs improves

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Conservatism threatens AIDS prevention in LatAm: UN

"A poster showing the AIDS red ribbon in Mexico City in 2008. AIDS is under control in Latin America and the Caribbean but a conservative wave threatens efforts to prevent the spread of the deadly HIV virus, UN experts said Tuesday. (AFP Photo/Ronaldo Schemidt)" title

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UNAIDS report shows critical gaps in world response

"A woman holds an AIDS awareness banner in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2011. Deaths from HIV/AIDS are rising in parts of Asia and central Europe and the global response must accelerate, experts said after the release of a major report on the world AIDS epidemic. (AFP Photo/Rodger Bosch)" title

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Mouse With Human-Like Immune System Could Advance AIDS Research

HealthDay – Thu, Jul 19, 2012 WEDNESDAY, July 18 (HealthDay News) -- Scientists who created mice with elements of the human immune system believe the rodents will further efforts to develop a vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

One of the challenges facing researchers striving to develop an HIV vaccine has been the lack of a laboratory animals that accurately reflect the human response to HIV and how the virus evolves to avoid that response.

The U.S. team of scientists transplanted human bone marrow cells and other human tissue into mice without a functioning immune system. This gave the mice aspects of the human immune system.

"Our study showed not only that these humanized mice mount human immune responses against HIV but also that the ability of HIV to evade these responses by mutating viral proteins targeted by CD8 'killer' T-cells is accurately reflected in these mice," study senior author Todd Allen, an associate professor medicine at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard, explained in a MGH news release.

T-cells are immune cells that protect the body from infection.

The mice might significantly reduce the time and costs required to test experimental HIV vaccines, according to the researchers.

The study was published in the July 18 issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine.

More information

The New Mexico AIDS Education and Training Center has more about HIV/AIDS vaccines.

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Infection With 2 HIV Strains Slows Disease Progression

HealthDay – Thu, Jul 19, 2012 WEDNESDAY, July 18 (HealthDay News) -- While many people don't know it, there's more than one kind of AIDS virus. Besides the HIV-1 strain that's common throughout the world, a type known as HIV-2 is found in some parts of Africa. Now, a new study finds that people infected with HIV-2 and later with HIV-1 appear to be better equipped to fight off the virus.

Double-infected people can still go on to develop AIDS, and there's no indication that anyone infected with HIV-1 should go out in search of HIV-2.

However, "this study should prompt researchers to take a fresh look at HIV-2 infection" and why it seems weaker, and the potential implications for a vaccine, said Sarah Rowland-Jones, an AIDS specialist and professor of immunology at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England.

The big questions, she said, are these: Is there something about the HIV-2 virus that makes it less dangerous to the human body's immune system defenses? Or is it perhaps the other way around, and the body's defenses are the key?

"If we understood this, it would have a lot of relevance for HIV vaccine design," said Rowland-Jones, who's familiar with the new study's findings.

The HIV-2 strain is largely found in West Africa and hasn't spread much beyond there, although there have been cases reported in Europe, India, Japan and the United States, Rowland-Jones said. Many people who are infected with the HIV-2 virus develop AIDS and die, but some live normal lives, she said.

The new study looked at West Africans in the country of Guinea-Bissau and focused on 223 people who first became infected with HIV-2 and then with HIV-1 or those who only got the HIV-1 strain.

The researchers tracked the patients for about 20 years. They found that it took an average of 104 months (nine years) for those with dual infections to develop AIDS, but just 68 months (nearly six years) for those infected solely with the HIV-1 virus.

"Those infected with HIV-2 first seem to be better prepared to handle the more aggressive HIV-1 infection and thereby have a longer progression time to AIDS," said study lead author Joakim Esbjörnsson, a postdoctoral researcher at Lund University, in Sweden.

"It is clear that the effect is huge," Esbjörnsson said, and it probably affects death rates, too.

Esbjörnsson emphasized that the research only looked at people who became infected with HIV-2 first: "People already single-infected with HIV-1 should under no circumstances try to get infected with HIV-2," he said.

Phyllis Kanki, an AIDS specialist and professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health, suggested that people who get infected with HIV-2, which affects the body more slowly, may develop better defenses against the virus. That, in turn, could help them more effectively fight the HIV-1 strain, she said.

The study appears in the July 19 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

More information

To learn more about HIV, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

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Experts: Africa countries lose out on AIDS funding

African nations are not receiving adequate international funding to fight HIV/AIDS, leaving them to face catastrophic consequences without enough medication, an independent, global medical and humanitarian organization said Thursday.

Experts at Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, said Congo is only able to supply anti-retroviral drugs to 15 percent of the people needing them and "patients are literally dying on our doorstep."

In a statement released in Johannesburg ahead of the United Nations world AIDS conference in Washington starting July 22, the organization said African countries worst affected by the pandemic were the least able to provide "the best science" available to fight it.

The group said that while world data by the U.N. has pointed to gains over the disease, donors have scaled back on earlier funding commitments to Africa.

African countries were being increasingly urged to find their own domestic solutions to the AIDS pandemic, it said.

"This is just a cynical excuse for donors to scale back on their earlier commitments of putting an end to this disease. It will have catastrophic consequences for patients," Dr. Eric Goemaere, the organization's senior regional adviser for southern Africa, told reporters in Johannesburg. "It would be outrageous to assume that African states could combat this emergency alone, given their current limited resources."

At the Washington summit, leaders and scientists are scheduled to review programs aimed at eventually eradicating AIDS. But plans to increase treatment and improve the quality of care in developing countries now risks being scrapped entirely as international support stagnated, the organization said.

The Global Fund, a major backer of anti-AIDS projects in South Africa and the region, now faced waning donor interest, it said.

The latest study issued by UNAIDS reports that international anti-AIDS funding hovered at about $8 billion in 2008 and has not increased by any significant amounts since then, forcing some developing nations to increase their own spending to keep existing programs running.

But just as the funds are being squeezed, bounds are being made.

South Africa on Thursday reported a decline in cases of mother-to-child transmission of the virus that causes AIDS because of treatment given to mothers and babies aged four to six weeks.

"It has proven that putting mothers and infants on treatment early on really works," Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi told reporters.

In South Africa, 32 percent of live births are HIV-exposed and it is estimated 30 percent of HIV-exposed babies will be infected within eight weeks of birth if there is no drug treatment. The country has 5.6 million people living with AIDS, the highest of any world nation, and an infection rate of about 18 percent of the population of 50 million.

According to Doctors Without Borders, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe have also reported progress in their AIDS programs.

Malawi was the first to begin prevention of mother-to-child transmission through treating infected expectant and breast feeding mothers.

Stuart Chuka, an official of the Malawi health ministry, said the eradication of AIDS now relied on state-of-the-art medical technology and the money to pay for it.

"Just as success is within reach, we're up against a great financial squeeze. I truly believe we can end AIDS. But we can't do it alone," he said Thursday.

Thierry Dethier, a Doctors Without Borders official based in Congo, said in that country just one tenth of health facilities offer AIDS treatment.

"We receive critically ill patients who have desperately searched for ARV treatment" whose condition had reached the point of death, he said.

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German parliament defends circumcision after court ban

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South Africa reports new success in saving newborns from HIV

"A newborn baby girl, daughter of a HIV-positive mother, receives an anti-retroviral drug at the Paarl Hospital in 2002. About 117,000 babies were saved from HIV infection last year under South Africa's scheme to prevent mothers from passing on the disease during childbirth, health official said Thursday. (AFP Photo/Anna Zieminski)" title

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Black and Gay in the USA: The Harsh Truth of HIV and AIDS

was released today, days before the start of the International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C.

MORE: FDA Approves Truvada as First HIV Prevention Drug

While black MSM represent 9 percent of all MSM in the country, they make up 38 percent of new infection cases among that group.

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Toward a cure for AIDS: Scientists set research agenda

Reuters – 22 hrs ago CHICAGO (Reuters) - A team of global scientists has devised a strategy to find a cure for AIDS, an effort inspired by the remarkable story of a single U.S. patient named Timothy Ray Brown who was cured from the disease.

Brown's treatment in Berlin involved the destruction of his immune system and a stem cell transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation that resists HIV infection. The procedure is too costly and too difficult to replicate on a large scale.

But in the years since his successful treatment in 2007, Brown's story has become a rallying point for scientists who believe the time is now right to seek a cure for AIDS.

Since the AIDS epidemic started 31 years ago, scientists have made great strides in treating the disease. AIDS-related deaths worldwide fell to 1.7 million last year from some 1.8 million in 2010, according to the latest report from United Nations AIDS program (UNAIDS).

Cocktails of powerful HIV drugs can keep the infection at bay for years, but the virus is wily, weaving itself into the DNA of special immune system cells, where it can lie dormant and out of reach of medications. That makes it necessary for HIV patients to take drugs over a lifetime.

As a result of better access to treatment, more patients with HIV are living near-normal lives, but the numbers of patients needing drugs is rising, increasing the future costs of AIDS treatment.

"Treatment is for life, and we know that it is important today and that it can slow the spread of the virus," said Michel Sidibé, executive director of UNAIDS.

But he said treatment should not be an end in itself.

"If we continue to believe it is the endgame, then we will have a challenge to get to 'zero,'" Sidibé said, referring to the goal of ending the epidemic.

"It's a first step," said Francoise Barre Sinoussi, who won a Nobel prize for her part in identifying human immunodeficiency virus. She is co-chair of the International Working Group Towards an HIV Cure, which released its proposed steps toward a cure on Thursday.

Sinoussi said the next step will be determining the cost-effectiveness of the strategy. That work will begin in conjunction with the International Aids Society's 2012 conference, which runs from July 22-27 in Washington.

GETTING RID OF THE VIRUS

Dr. Steven Deeks of the University of California San Francisco division of HIV/AIDS, who is co-chair of the working group, said health professionals see a growing need to "switch from blocking the virus to getting rid of the virus."

Instead of trying to copy the treatment received by Brown, researchers will seek a similar response in a way that is less costly and easier to replicate.

Among the first tasks, according to Deeks, will be to continue basic research in the lab to understand why the virus persists in the body and where it hides out.

Scientists will also need to understand immune system function in HIV-infected patients and determine whether inflammation is playing a role in protecting the virus.

Other teams will need to determine why some patients develop antibodies to the virus, allowing them to control the infection, and whether this can be applied to the search for a cure.

Deeks said doctors need better tests to measure levels of the virus. Researchers will need to develop drugs that flush out the virus from its hiding places in the body, making it more vulnerable to treatment, as well as powerful medications to bolster the immune system's own ability to fight off infection.

Rowena Johnston, of the Foundation for AIDS Research, which is helping fund development of a cure, said the global strategy will help consolidate research efforts.

"Now that we know what the questions are, we can focus our efforts in the right direction," she said at a briefing announcing the new push.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, a part of the National Institutes of Health, said his agency supports the work but that it is far too early to handicap its success.

"We still have so much discovery to do with regard to a cure that there's no guarantee when or if it will happen. We're sort of where we were over a decade ago with a vaccine," he said.

Back then, scientists were far less certain about vaccine prospects after repeated trial failures, but sentiment changed in 2009 with the first report in Thailand of a modestly successful HIV vaccine trial.

"Now I can say, I'm confident that we'll get a vaccine, I just can't tell you when. With a cure, we're still at the very nascent phase of discovery," Fauci said.

(Additional reporting by Susan Heavey and Salimah Ebrihim in Washington; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Cynthia Osterman)

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Time to overhaul AIDS strategies for gays - study

"A staff member holds a packet containing a free condom in the HIV department of Taipei City Hospital in Taipei. Three decades of safe-sex messages to gays have failed to stem the spread of HIV among a population at greater risk of the AIDS virus than heterosexuals, experts warned in The Lancet on Friday. (AFP Photo/Sam Yeh)" title

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