Hiv

A new study showing an estimated 7% of American teens and adults carry the human papillomavirus in their mouths may help health experts finally understand why rates of mouth and throat cancer have been climbing for nearly 25 years. The evidence makes it clear that oral sex practices play a key role in transmission. The new data, published online Thursday by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., are the first to assess the prevalence of oral HPV infection in the U.S. population.

At any one time, hundreds of clinical trials are underway in the U.S. to test simpler and more effective ways to treat and prevent HIV infection, which afflicts more than 1 million people in this country. Most of those in the U.S. with HIV - and with AIDs in its full-blown stage - are men. So, understandably, men make up the majority of the participants in the trials. However, women, who account for 25% of those living with HIV in the U.S., are significantly underrepresented in clinical trials, according to infectious disease researchers and health professionals who have studied this issue.

Bob Costas, the television sports analyst widely considered one of the best in the country, was no different from many athletes, sports fans and basketball experts 20 years ago Monday when Magic Johnson held a news conference to tell the world he was HIV-positive. "I was stunned," Costas said, "and my immediate thought was, knowing what we thought we knew about HIV, we would watch Magic Johnson die a public death, that he would waste away. This was what we thought we understood about the virus, that his days were numbered.

The Food and Drug Administration warned Friday that doctors should not prescribe and patients should not use the hepatitis C drug Victrelis (boceprevir) and the anti-HIV drug ritonavir at the same time because such use reduces the effectiveness of both drugs. Patients already using the two drugs simultaneously should not stop taking them without consulting their doctor, however, the agency cautioned. Ritonavir, a protease inhibitor, is commonly used to boost the effectiveness of other protease inhibitors and is found in Reyataz (atazanavir/ritonavir)

At any one time, hundreds of clinical trials are underway in the U.S. to test simpler and more effective ways to treat and prevent HIV infection, which afflicts more than 1 million people in this country. Most of those in the U.S. with HIV - and with AIDs in its full-blown stage - are men. So, understandably, men make up the majority of the participants in the trials. However, women, who account for 25% of those living with HIV in the U.S., are significantly underrepresented in clinical trials, according to infectious disease researchers and health professionals who have studied this issue.

To many of the nation's million people living with a diagnosis of HIV/AIDS, Timothy Brown is the Harry Potter of the disease: Like the young wizard who survived Lord Voldemort's wrath, he is the boy who lived. Today, almost 20 years after he became infected, Brown is, essentially, cured. Brown, now 45, is known in medical-journal circles as "The Berlin Patient," a moniker assigned him by a February 2009 case study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. In a "Brief Report," oncologist Gero Huetter and his colleagues at Berlin's University Hospital described the unique stem-cell transplant of an HIV-infected patient — Brown — who had acute myeloid leukemia, and the remarkable result: Twenty months after the procedure, the virus had not reappeared in Brown's body, even though he was no longer taking antiretroviral drugs.

When Steven Dimmick, 31, was diagnosed with HIV seven years ago, his doctors felt confident they could find a regimen of drugs to help him live a healthy life for many years. The outlook got less rosy in June when Dimmick, a Florida hairdresser with an annual income of less than $30,000, found that he ? along with thousands of other HIV-positive patients across the country ? had been dumped from his state's AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) and moved to a waiting list. The programs, operated by individual states with mostly federal funds, generally cover the cost of antiretroviral drugs.

For decades, the nation's pornographic film industry found a happy, largely accepting home in Los Angeles. Producers operated lucrative businesses in anonymous office parks in the San Fernando Valley. Available in the city were a steady supply of actors and film production talent as well as opulent mansions that often served as theatrical backdrops. By one estimate, at least 5% of on-location shoots were for adult films. But this coexistence has been suddenly shaken by sweeping health regulations that, starting March 5, will require porn performers to wear condoms while on location.

Last month, the United Kingdom lifted its long-standing ban on accepting blood donations from gay men. Instead, health officials there implemented a new policy that allows men to become blood donors as long as they haven't had sex with another man in the previous year. With this decision, the U.K. joined France, Italy, Japan and eight other developed countries in allowing gay and bisexual men to contribute to the nation's blood supply. Many of those countries require sexually active gay men to wait a year before giving blood, while others have deferral periods of six months or five years.

Heterosexuals living below the poverty line in U.S. cities are five times as likely as the nation's general population to be HIV-positive, regardless of their race or ethnicity, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday. Their neighbors in the impoverished communities who live above the poverty line are 2.5 times as likely to be infected, according to the first comprehensive study of groups that aren't involved in risky behaviors. Because African Americans are 4.5 times as likely as whites to live in poverty and Latinos are four times as likely to do so, the findings could account for many of the ethnic and racial disparities in human immunodeficiency virus infections in this country, said Dr. Paul Denning, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC. Denning was the lead author of the study, which was released in Vienna at the International AIDS Conference.

California will test an HIV-prevention pill in an attempt to slow the spread of the disease in the state, researchers announced Tuesday. The pill, which is already used to treat HIV patients, will be prescribed to 700 gay and bisexual men and transgender women in Los Angeles, San Diego and Long Beach who are high-risk but not infected. "With this new prevention pill, we have another intervention to put in the arsenal to try and impact this epidemic," said George Lemp, director of the California HIV/AIDS Research Program with the UC president's office.

The first cases of HIV identified anywhere in the world are widely thought to have been in Los Angeles in 1981. Since then, 45,000 Angelenos have contracted HIV and nearly half have died due to the disease. As terrible as that statistic is, we can look back over the last 30 years with considerable pride because Los Angeles' courageous response to the epidemic also saved many lives. We now know how much worse things would have been had local elected leaders not braved controversy to support one of the most effective HIV prevention tools we have: needle exchange.

African American women in six U.S. cities are becoming infected with HIV at a rate five times the national average for black women, and closer to the rates of some African countries, according to a new study. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and around the country who made the findings suspected the rates were relatively high in these "hot spots" that have battled the epidemic for decades, but the numbers still came as a surprise in a field that tends to focus more on black and gay men. The researchers found that in Baltimore; Atlanta; Newark, N.J.; New York City; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; and Washington, the annual rate of infection was 24 per 10,000 black women.

They belong to a club that no one else will ever join. Its numbers are dropping and notoriety is fading, and they risk becoming little more than a footnote in the history of the AIDS crisis. They were infected with HIV as newborns at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, through transfusions of donated blood that carried a virus so virulent it was killing healthy young men, and so new and bewildering, it did not yet have a name. It was 1985 before a blood test was developed that could detect the virus.

Lakers legend and entrepreneur Earvin "Magic" Johnson made "The Announcement," an ESPN documentary about his life with a frightening diagnosis, to remind people that HIV and AIDS are still both fatal — and preventable. "I am not cured," he says at the film's end. Director Nelson George's moving and informative film does that and more. It highlights, among other things, the wonder that was Magic Johnson as a basketball player, the après-moi madness of L.A. in 1979, the horror of the AIDS crisis, the value and valor of frankness and, perhaps most important, why, despite all the heartbreak they cause, we still need sports heroes.

HIV infection rates among black women in some parts of the United States are similar to the incidence seen in sub-Saharan Africa, researchers reported Thursday. The study found a rate of HIV infection of 0.24% in a group of almost 2,100 women, most of whom were black. That rate is five times higher than previous estimates issued by the federal government. The high infection rate was found in six geographic areas that are known to be hard hit by the HIV epidemic and where poverty is more common.

The House gave its stamp of approval Thursday to the controversial ban on AIDS-infected immigrants, and the White House indicated it is likely to agree despite President Clinton's oft-stated intention to remove the prohibition. "The President has to work with Congress," White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers said. "He can't act unilaterally on issues like this. " The House voted, 356 to 58, to direct members of a House-Senate conference committee to accept a Senate amendment keeping the ban. The amendment, part of a Senate bill reauthorizing programs of the National Institutes of Health, forbids AIDS-infected immigrants to enter the United States but changes current rules to enable tourists or other visitors to come into this country for up to 30 days without requiring them to be tested.

Magic Johnson stood with his trademark smile Monday in front of his family, Lakers greats, politicians and friends, all of whom had come to celebrate his life and how his revelation from 20 years ago that he was HIV-positive had received worldwide attention. He could only shake his head and say, "I am here 20 years later…Wow! What a blessing. " On Nov. 7, 1991, Johnson announced that he was retiring from the Lakers because he had the virus that causes AIDS, and now two decades later, Johnson is happy to be the "face of this disease.

As pioneering hematologist Dr. Edward Shanbrom looked for simple solutions to complex problems, his home was often his laboratory and common household items his scientific ally. When he needed a filter to test a concept, one made for coffee would do just fine. If he was investigating ideas related to plasma and none was available, he would use milk because it shares many properties with plasma. "I don't do sophisticated science," Shanbrom once said. "My work is quick and feasible" yet could "be very important.

Hepatitis C mortality rates surpassed HIV mortality rates in the United States in 2007, researchers said Monday. In a study in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine ( abstract here ), U.S. Centers for Disease Control researchers analyzed causes of death on more than 21.8 million U.S. death certificates filed between 1999 and 2007. Rates of death related to hepatitis C, a viral infection that causes chronic liver disease, rose at an average rate of .18 deaths per 100,000 persons per year.