aids

Remember Luc Montagnier? Sure, you do. He's the Nobel Laureate whose identification of the virus that causes AIDS garnered him plaudits, laurels, and, of course, the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Unfortunately, since winning the Nobel Prize, from a scientific standpoint, Montagnier's been on a downward spiral. Sadly, it didn't take long after his Nobel acceptance speech for disturbing signs of crankery and quackery to appear. For instance, Montagnier published a paper that implied that DNA could teleport, using this study, whose results were almost certainly the result of contaminants in…

This is the seventh of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Joshua Pikora. Recently an article published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases titled Chagas Disease: “The New HIV/AIDS of the Americas” caused a stir in the media receiving coverage through Fox News and The New York Times among others.  This article, as the title indicates, claims that Chagas disease is the new AIDS of the Americas and likens the current situation of Chagas disease to that of the first two decades of the AIDS epidemic, but is that truly the case1?  The argument that I gained from the article is that the early…

Thirty years ago today, the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published a report of five young men with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia who were treated at three different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. The authors observed that all five patients had no known common contacts, but had in common the fact that they "reported having frequent homosexual contact with various partners" and using inhalant drugs. An accompanying editorial note explained: Pneumocystis pneumonia in the United States is almost exclusively limited to severely immunosuppressed patients (1). The occurrence…

We all know of once-respected scientists who ended up going off the deep end, adhering to an unproven idea despite massive evidence to the contrary. Linus Pauling and his advocacy of megadoses of Vitamin C, or Peter Duesberg's descent into HIV denial. It's all the more disappointing when the one taking a dive is a woman, since there are, compared to men, relatively fewer female "big names" in the sciences. So when one goes from views that were, perhaps, outside of the mainstream (but later proven largely correct) to complete science denialism, it makes it all the more depressing. Even worse,…

Today, is World AIDS Day, and while the pandemic continues to devastate millions of lives, we can also honor some achievements. CDC reports that when PEPFAR (the US President's Plan for AIDS Relief) started in 2003, fewer than 50,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa were getting antiretroviral drugs; now, thanks to a global collaboration, more than 5 million people in low- and middle-income countries receive this treatment. We've also seen some encouraging results from research on vaginal microbicidal gel and daily antiretrovirals to prevent new infections. Care for the 33.4 million people living…

Readers may be interested in participating in this, from Dave Wessner at Davidson College: Building on a project I piloted last fall, I will explore the potential role of Twitter more intentionally this fall in a course I teach on HIV/AIDS at Davidson College. I invite you to join me in this exploration. Here are a few details: Basically, I am interested in extending the class conversation outside the classroom walls and beyond the appointed class hours. I want the students to begin thinking on their own about what aspects of the subject (HIV/AIDS, in this case) truly interest them. I want to…

In a recent New York Times article, Celia Dugger reports on encouraging results from two studies on interventions that help women in South Africa and Malawi reduce their risk of HIV infection. The first study found that women using a vaginal microbicidal gel were 39% less likely to contract HIV than those using a placebo. It has been published in Science, and its authors write in their abstract: The CAPRISA 004 trial assessed effectiveness and safety of a 1% vaginal gel formulation of tenofovir, a nucleotide reverse transcriptase inhibitor, for the prevention of HIV acquisition in women. A…

tags: Stephen Fry on Catholicism, Intelligence Squared Debate, religion, catholicism, Catholic Church, poverty, sexuality,homosexuality, AIDS, HIV, condoms, pedophilia, child rape, culture, Stephen Fry, streaming video Stephen Fry provides his very articulate and thoughtful opinion on Catholicism and the Catholic Church at the Intelligence Squared Debate.

Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion. The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…

If there's one thing that has irritated me (one might even say, irritated me enough to start this blog), it's ideology or religion trumping science. Perhaps the most annoying form of this disease is the tendency of the right wing whackosphere to do everything and anything it can to distort and twist science to agree with its ideology, in particular its religion. One area that I used to write about a lot but don't so much anymore (we bloggers have to subspecialize, I guess, and these days my subspecialty is science-based medicine with only the occasional forays against forms of unreason other…

Student guest post by Francis Mawanda. HIV/AIDS is a major public health problem worldwide. To date, it is estimated that more than 60 million people have been infected with HIV and more than 25 million people have died as a result of HIV/AIDS worldwide1. Despite the high prevalence and mortality rates that are associated with HIV/AIDS, and after more than 29 years of aggressive research efforts, there is still no cure or vaccine to prevent against HIV/AIDS. And although the introduction of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs in the mid 1990s greatly improved the outlook, health and quality of life…

tags: Sex, Drugs and HIV -- Let's Get Rational, behavior, disease, prostitution, gay men, drug addicts, sex, STD, HIV, AIDS, poverty, medicine, public health, Compassion Conundrum, Elizabeth Pisani, TEDTalks, streaming video Armed with bracing logic, wit and her "public-health nerd" glasses, Elizabeth Pisani reveals the myriad of inconsistencies in today's political systems that prevent our dollars from effectively fighting the spread of HIV. Her research with at-risk populations -- from junkies in prison to sex workers on the street in Cambodia -- demonstrates the sometimes counter-intuitive…

These days, I'm having a love-hate relationship with Elsevier. On the one hand, there are lots of reasons to hate Elsevier. For example, Elsevier took payments from Merck, Sharp & Dohme in order to publish in essence a fake journal designed to promote its products, and then got caught doing it again. On the other hand, Elsevier owns both The Lancet and NeuroToxicology. The former recently retracted Andrew Wakefield's original 1998 Lancet paper that launched the latest iteration of the anti-vaccine movement in the U.K., as well as a thousand quacks, to be followed by the latter, which…

I'm always pleasantly surprised when a topic generates enthusiastic reader feedback, particularly when comments come from long-time readers who share experiences I never knew they had or, in some cases, comment for the first time. The topic this time was a simple reflection on my current bout of pneumonia and my being taken aback by how debilitating it has been mentally. It's taken me two days just put put together these few sentences of what will essentially be a referral post. A very thoughtful commenter posed a question to me about what does it mean to be "really sick." What is long-term…

I'd like to start this post by thanking a commenter named Paul Grenville. He provided me with this blogging material and, indeed, may have supplied me with material for two blog posts. He did it by showing up in an old post about a homoepath named Jeremy Sherr, who has been bringing woo to the natives, so to speak, by treating HIV/AIDS patients in Africa with homeopathy. Sherr, as you may recall, Sherr had announced his plans to do "clinical trials" using homeopathy for HIV/AIDS and even bragged about treating Tanzanians with quackery. He then tried--shall we say?--to revise history by making…

Officials Weigh Circumcision to Fight H.I.V. Risk: Public health officials are considering promoting routine circumcision for all baby boys born in the United States to reduce the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. ... He and other experts acknowledged that although the clinical trials of circumcision in Africa had dramatic results, the effects of circumcision in the United States were likely to be more muted because the disease is less prevalent here, because it spreads through different routes and because the health systems are so disparate as to be incomparable. Clinical trials…

Male Circumcision Reduces HIV Risk: No Further Evidence Needed, According To Review: The clinical trials included in the review took place in South Africa, Uganda, and Kenya between 2002 and 2006, and included a total of 11,054 men. The results show that circumcision in heterosexual men significantly reduces their risk of acquiring HIV by 54% over a two year period, compared with uncircumcised men. This reduced risk is the best estimate of the average effect and the researchers report that the true risk will be reduced by between 38 to 66%. Further research, however, is required to establish…

Pope Benedict, the former head of the same Church body that ran the Inquisition, has done it again. He just committed an act which is morally equivalent to involuntary sodomy, and did it to an entire continent. Africa, the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic, sometimes seems to have not all that much going for it---AIDS drugs are expensive, some leaders have been idiots, but there have been some bright lights, such as Botswana's comprehensive HIV prevention program. So when some German dude walks in and tells everyone that condoms are wrong and may make the problem worse, one might consider…

Pope Benedict XVI provoked outrage amongst health officials last week when he stated that condoms were not the answer to Africa's fight against HIV and Aids, and could even worsen the problem. His comments came during the Pope's first visit to Africa, highlighting the Catholic Church's controversial stance which places a strong emphasis on sexual abstinence and fidelity to prevent the spread of disease. Professor Susan Wood, co-chair of the advisory committee for women's health, has indicated that the Obama administration is likely to reverse many of the Bush-era policies requiring…

Before I started medical school I worked at a clinic that served the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. I was the "front office", greeting patients, answering the phone by TDD/TTY or by relay service (this was before the existence of text messaging, instant messaging, or anything else that relied on cell phones or on the internet---none was in common use). I learned some rudimentary ASL (simple, polite phrases), and was introduced to the deaf community. It was simply fascinating. I learned about the controversies surrounding deaf culture (such as cochlear implants, assimilation, and…