Truvada Drug Trials Signal 'Turning Point' In The Battle Against AIDS

Truvada Drug Trials Signal 'Turning Point' In AIDS Epidemic -- USA Today

A trio of new studies highlights the promise and challenges of preventing the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS: Giving anti-AIDS drugs to healthy but high-risk patients can dramatically reduce the risk of infection.

Two studies from Africa in heterosexual patients found that the drugs reduced the rate of HIV infection by 62% to 75%, a success rate that's comparable to results from studies of gay men, according to research in today's New England Journal of Medicine. A third study in African women at high risk of infection, however, was ended early after researchers saw the drugs had no effect on HIV rates, largely because fewer than 40% of study participants took their pills as instructed.

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My Comment: Say what they want .... the battle against AIDS is a long battle that will years (if ever) to succeed.

Have Americans Forgotten About AIDS?

The Global Epidemic the U.S. Forgot -- Yahoo News/ABC

Like a brush fire, The HIV/AIDS epidemic has spread across the world over the last 30 years, picking up steam in certain areas and losing steam in others. Why?

While rates of infection in Western nations have gone down, there has been an explosion of cases in sub-Saharan Africa, India, China and parts of Russia.

In this two week Around the World special, Christiane Amanpour takes an in depth look at the illness that has defined an era, a disease that strikes fear in all of us.

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My Comment: Americans have not forgotten about AIDS .... it is just that other issues have taken precedent.

AIDS Virus Might Be A Million Years Old

Island-specific strains of the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which infects monkeys such as the Bioko Drill, revealed the virus has been around thousands of years longer than previously thought. Credit: Preston Marx, Tulane University

From Cosmos:

WASHINGTON: An HIV-like virus that infects monkeys is thousands of years older than previously thought and its slow evolution could have disturbing implications for humans, according to a new study.

Scientists said the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) - the ancestor to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS - is probably between 32,000 and 75,000 years old and may even date back a million years.

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Aids: Is The End In Sight?

From The Independent:

Mass prescription of anti-retroviral drugs could eradicate the disease within 40 years, scientist says.

Testing everyone at risk of HIV and treating them with anti-retroviral drugs could eradicate the global epidemic within 40 years, according to the scientist at the centre of a radical new approach to fighting Aids.

An aggressive programme of prescribing anti-retroviral treatment (ART) to every person infected with HIV could stop all new infections in five years and eventually wipe out the epidemic, said Brian Williams of the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis.

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Universal Therapy Could Contain Aids Epidemic In Five Years

From Times Online:

The global Aids epidemic could be contained within just five years by testing everybody in high-risk regions and immediately treating all those who are found to be HIV positive, according to a leading scientist.

Universal therapy with anti-retroviral drugs would not only save millions of lives, but would also prevent transmission of HIV by making people who carry the virus less infectious to others, said Brian Williams, of the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis (Sacema).

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Scientists Say Crack HIV/AIDS Puzzle For Drugs

From Reuters:

Study solves puzzle that eluded scientists for 20 years.

* Finding should help development of new HIV/AIDS medicines
* Allows scientists to see how Merck and Gilead drugs work

LONDON, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Scientists say they have solved a crucial puzzle about the AIDS virus after 20 years of research and that their findings could lead to better treatments for HIV.

British and U.S. researchers said they had grown a crystal that enabled them to see the structure of an enzyme called integrase, which is found in retroviruses like HIV and is a target for some of the newest HIV medicines.

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New Study Raises Concerns About HIV-Drug Resistance

A supply of antiretroviral drugs is prepared for free distribution to HIV patients at the Integrated HIV Service Unit at the Cipto Mangunkusumo government hospital in Jakarta, Indonesia. Romeo Gacad / AFP / Getty

From Time Magazine:

Last January a team of scientists at the World Health Organization (WHO) published a study in the British medical journal the Lancet making the audacious claim that the tools already exist to end the AIDS epidemic. Doctors have long noted that antiretrovirals — the drugs commonly used to treat HIV — are so successful at suppressing the number of viruses in an infected patient's blood that they can render a person no longer contagious. Using mathematical models, the researchers claimed that universal HIV testing followed by the immediate treatment of newly infected patients with antiretroviral drugs could eliminate the disease from even the most heavily infected populations within 10 years.

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Discovery On HIV Testing Could Save A Million Lives

From The Independent:

Scientists have made a major advance in understanding the treatment of HIV which could see life-saving drugs extended to more than one million extra people at no additional cost. Researchers have discovered that routine laboratory testing of blood for signs of side-effects – long regarded as essential for HIV treatment – is unnecessary and a waste of time and money.

By abandoning routine laboratory testing, which is costly and requires sophisticated equipment only available in hospitals, the money saved could be used to buy and distribute extra anti-retroviral drugs.

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Vaccines On Horizon For AIDS, Alzheimer's

From Time Magazine:

(MARIETTA, Pa.) — Malaria. Tuberculosis. Alzheimer's disease. AIDS. Pandemic flu. Genital herpes. Urinary tract infections. Grass allergies. Traveler's diarrhea. You name it, the pharmaceutical industry is working on a vaccine to prevent it.

Many could be on the market in five years or less.

Contrast that with five years ago, when so many companies had abandoned the vaccine business that half the U.S. supply of flu shots was lost because of contamination at one of the two manufacturers left.

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AIDS Leading Cause Of Death In Women

From Time Magazine:

(GENEVA) — In its first study of women's health around the globe, the World Health Organization said Monday that the AIDS virus is the leading cause of death and disease among women between the ages of 15 and 44.

Unsafe sex is the leading risk factor in developing countries for these women of childbearing age, with others including lack of access to contraceptives and iron deficiency, the WHO said. Throughout the world, one in five deaths among women in this age group is linked to unsafe sex, according to the U.N. agency.

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Aids/HIV: Where It Came From And How It Spread

From The Telegraph:

Aids is now generally acknowledged to be caused by HIV which was originally transferred to humans from chimpanzees from West Africa.

The first known cases of Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (Aids) occurred in the United States in the early 1980s, among a number of homosexual men in New York and California. At that time, the illnesses were seen as rare, opportunistic and linked to cancer that seemed resistant to treatment. Before long, it became clear that the men were suffering from one illness.

As scientists delved into what had caused Aids, they discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) virus, which is know as a "lentivirus", or "slow virus", because it takes such a long time to produce any adverse effects in the body.

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Update: Aids/HIV by numbers -- The Telegraph

New Hope For Aids Vaccine As Scientists Find 'Achilles Heel'

From Times Online:

The search for an HIV vaccine has taken a major step forward with the discovery of a potential Achilles heel of the virus that causes Aids.

Two powerful antibodies that attack a vulnerable spot common to many strains of HIV have been identified, improving the prospects for a vaccine against a virus that affects an estimated 33 million people and kills over 2 million each year.

The discovery is important because it highlights a potential way around HIV’s defences against the human immune system, which have so far thwarted efforts to make a workable vaccine. The hope is that a vaccine that stimulates the production of these antibodies could remain effective against HIV even as the virus mutates.

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New HIV Strain Leapt To Humans From Gorillas: Study

A gorilla at a park in Rwanda in 2004

From AFP:

PARIS — French virologists on Sunday said they had found a new subtype of the AIDS virus that appears to have jumped the species barrier to humans from gorillas.

The new strain, found in a woman from Cameroon, West Africa, is part of the HIV-1 family of microbes that account for the vast majority of cases of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), they said.

Until now, all have been linked to the chimpanzee.

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Update: New HIV strain discovered in woman from Cameroon --AP

From Haiti, A Surprise: Good News About AIDS

In this May 7, 2009 photo, patients with HIV/AIDS wait to be attended at the Partners in Health hospital in Cange, in central Haiti. Haitian infection rates dropped from 6.2 percent to 3.1 percent among expectant mothers in the last 15 years. Researchers recently switched to a new methodology that tests all adults, which puts Haiti's official rate at 2.2 percent, according to UNAIDS. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

From Yahoo News/AP:

BLANCHARD, Haiti – When Micheline Leon was diagnosed with HIV, her parents told her they would fit her for a coffin.

Fifteen years later, she walks around her two-room concrete house on Haiti's central plateau, watching her four children play under the plantain trees. She looks healthy, her belly amply filling a gray, secondhand T-shirt. Her three sons and one daughter were born after she was diagnosed. None has the virus.

"I'm not sick," she explained patiently on a recent afternoon. "People call me sick but I'm not. I'm infected."

In many ways the 35-year-old mother's story is Haiti's too. In the early 1980s, when the strange and terrifying disease showed up in the U.S. among migrants who had escaped Haiti's dictatorship, experts thought it could wipe out a third of the country's population.

Instead, Haiti's HIV infection rate stayed in the single digits, then plummeted.

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Europe's HIV Followed Holiday Routes

This map depicts the spread of HIV in Europe
(Image: Dimitrios Paraskevis et al., Retrovirology, 2009)

From New Scientist:

HIV's European tour may have begun in the Mediterranean. A new genetic map plotted from viruses in hundreds of people suggests that many European strains of HIV trace their ancestry to Greece, Portugal, Serbia and Spain.

Sun-seeking tourists from northern and central Europe might account for the pattern, the study's authors say.

The vast majority of the study's participants said they acquired their infections in their home country, so the patterns could be a vestige of HIV's emergence and early spread through Europe in the early 1980s, probably after arriving from the US.

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Man Who Co-Discovered HIV Virus Accused Of Stealing Rights To Aids Cure

From The Telegraph:

A Nobel prize-winning French researcher who co-discovered the virus that leads to Aids but sparked controversy after his colleague said he had claimed all the glory, has now been accused of stealing the rights to a revolutionary invention that may provide a cure to the disease, it emerged yesterday.

Prof Luc Montagnier is locked in a legal battle with inventor Bruno Robert over the intellectual property rights to a technique whereby the Aids virus and other serious ailments, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, can be pinpointed by their electromagnetic "signatures".

The hope is that once identified, the diseases can be blocked or neutralised with an opposite electromagnetic signal.

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HIV Is Evolving To Evade Human Immune Responses

Rendering of HIV infecting a cell. (Credit: iStockphoto/Sebastian Kaulitzki)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 28, 2009) — HIV is evolving rapidly to escape the human immune system, an international study led by Oxford University has shown. The findings, published in Nature, demonstrate the challenge involved in developing a vaccine for HIV that keeps pace with the changing nature of the virus.

‘The extent of the global HIV epidemic gives us a unique opportunity to examine in detail the evolutionary struggle being played out in front of us between an important virus and humans,’ says lead researcher Professor Philip Goulder of the Peter Medawar Building for Pathogen Research at Oxford University.

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AIDS Top Killer Disease In China Last Year: Govt

From Reuters:

BEIJING (Reuters) - The AIDS virus became the top deadly infectious disease in China last year for the first time, killing 6,897 people in the first nine months of 2008, the official news agency Xinhua said on Tuesday.

The number of people infected with the HIV/AIDS virus doubled during that period, Xinhua said, citing a report posted on the Ministry of Health website.

Xinhua said there were a total of 264,302 HIV/AIDS cases by the end of September last year and 34,864 people have died of the disease so far.

United Nations figures estimate that 700,000 people in China were HIV positive by the end of 2007.

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Can a Bone-Marrow Transplant Halt HIV?

Bone-marrow cell
MedicalRF.com / Getty

From Time Magazine:

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a pathogen so wily and protean that researchers rarely talk about curing infected patients, focusing instead on treatment and prevention. But in an announcement that caused a flutter of excitement and a wave of prudent skepticism, Berlin-based hematologist Gero Huetter claimed on Thursday that he has cured an HIV infection in a 42-year-old man through a bone-marrow transplant.

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HIV/AIDS Is Not A New Disease

HIV-infected T cells. (Credit: Courtesy of Dr. Tom Folks, NIAID)

HIV/AIDS Pandemic Began Around 1900, Earlier Than Previously Thought; Urbanization In Africa Marked Outbreak -- Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Oct. 2, 2008) — New research indicates that the most pervasive global strain of HIV began spreading among humans between 1884 and 1924, suggesting that growing urbanization in colonial Africa set the stage for the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

The estimated period of origin, considerably earlier than the previous estimate of 1930, coincides with the establishment and rise of urban centers in west-central Africa where the pandemic HIV strain, HIV-1 group M, emerged. The growth of cities and associated high-risk behaviors may have been the key change that allowed the virus to flourish.

The research, led by Michael Worobey, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at The University of Arizona in Tucson, was co-sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The findings are published in the current issue of the journal Nature.

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