Transitioning to an AIDS-Free Generation. There was much to celebrate on World AIDS Day last week. Over the last decade, an unprecedented surge in donor support for HIV/AIDS treatment has lengthened and improved the lives of millions of people living with the disease. The number of people receiving antiretroviral treatment worldwide stands at more than six million in 2011, a 16-fold increase since 2003. Accordingly, those affected with HIV/AIDS are living, on average, longer lives than at any point since the dawn of the pandemic.
But celebration is premature. Read more at at Foreign Affairs' Special Report: Global Public Health. It is unfortunate that so many have focused on treatment alone because there is a way to end the global scourge of HIV/AIDS: by conditioning the rate of expansion of treatment programs on the reduction of new infections. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register Register now to get three articles each month. As a subscriber, you get unrestricted access to ForeignAffairs.com. Will we ever have an HIV vaccine? | Not Exactly Rocket Science. Here’s the seventh piece from my new BBC column For around 30 years we have lived under the spectre of HIV. In the early 1980s, the mysterious appearance of symptoms that would later be known as AIDS led to unprecedented efforts to unmask the cause.
On 23 April 1984, Margaret Heckler, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, told the world that scientists had identified the virus that was the probable cause of AIDS. She was correct. She also said that a vaccine would be “ready for testing in approximately two years.” Despite 28 years of research, there is still no vaccine that provides effective protection against HIV, and in that time around 25 million people have died of HIV-related causes.
The virus is the most diverse we know of. Vaccines train the immune system to recognise part of a virus, creating a long-term armada of antibodies that seek and destroy the invader, should it ever show its face. Uphill struggle The only sliver of success came in 2009. Renewed hope Image by Dr. Breast milk seems to kill HIV - health - 15 June 2012. Breast milk is starting to look like a potent HIV-fighter. An unknown component of breast milk appears to kill HIV particles and virus-infected cells, as well as blocking HIV transmission in mice with a human immune system. Even if babies born to HIV-positive mothers avoid infection during birth, around 15 per cent contract HIV in early childhood. Since the virus can get into milk, breastfeeding was one suspect. To investigate further, Angela Wahl at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her colleagues created mice with human bone marrow, liver and thymus tissues that all became infected with HIV if the mice were given an oral dose of the virus.
However, if the rodents were fed breast milk containing HIV, the virus wasn't transmitted. Previous research had hinted that breast milk might have antiviral properties, but it was unclear if it would prevent HIV transmission. The hunt is now on for the mysterious ingredient in breast milk that inhibits the virus.
More from the web. Facebook: The next tool in fighting STDs. Imagine being able to download a Facebook app that would alert you to your sexually transmitted infection risk based on your friend’s status updates. This may sound far-fetched, and it still is, but as some researchers shift their focus to risk among friend groups, as opposed to just sexual partners, social networks are rapidly becoming a tool to prevent the spread of STIs. Peter Leone, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Infectious Diseases, is one of those experts.
Earlier this month, he spoke at an international health conference and underscored the importance of exploring such possibilities. Real-world social networks — in other words, a person’s circle of friends and sexual partners — have already proved to be strong predictors of STI risk, he says. Leone found that when sexual partners of patients newly diagnosed with HIV came in for testing, 20 percent turned up HIV-positive.
Timeline: A Few Landmarks In the Effort to Treat AIDS. Colonialism in Africa helped launch the HIV epidemic a century ago. As to the why, here is where the story gets even more fascinating, and terrible. We typically think of diseases in terms of how they threaten us personally. But they have their own stories. Diseases are born. They grow. They falter, and sometimes they die. In every case these changes happen for reasons. For decades nobody knew the reasons behind the birth of the AIDS epidemic. The most disruptive of these intruders were thousands of African porters. In the century since, it has been responsible for 99 percent of all of the world’s deaths from AIDS — not just in Africa but in Moscow, Bangkok, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, New York, Washington.
It was here, by accident but with motives by no means pure, that the world built a tinderbox and tossed in a spark. The chimps of Cameroon Many simians, such as gorillas and monkeys, can carry a virus that resembles HIV. Finding a more exact location took a remarkable degree of scientific ingenuity. Ivory and rubber The role of African porters. News Desk: The Changing AIDS Epidemic—and What to Do Next. There is a lot of optimism now in the community of public-health officials and advocates who work on AIDS.
People are being treated with more effective medicine in more places and in greater numbers around the world than many ever thought possible. The world is getting smarter about outsmarting the AIDS virus. But, even as we know more, there are still disputes about how best to move forward on both prevention and treatment. Such is the nature of AIDS, especially as it involves an attempt to understand the complexity of human behavior as it relates to sex. Seventeen years ago, when I was on President Clinton’s staff, helping to organize the White House Conference on AIDS, it was still seen as a disease which largely impacted gay men in the United States.
But that was changing, and it is now mostly the province of global public-health officials and diplomats, not gay-rights advocates. Not everybody is optimistic, though. *Anti-viral drug treatment for everyone living with H.I.V. India's Polio Win. In January, India marked an incredible achievement: one year since the country's last reported case of polio. That is cause for celebration -- not just in India but around the world.
Twenty years ago, there were more than 100 polio-endemic countries; now, only three remain. Such a victory over polio seemed almost impossible just a decade ago. India's tropical climate is conducive to the survival and spread of the disease. Meanwhile, India's dense, ethnically and linguistically diverse population made it difficult for the government to reach its most at-risk citizens. So, even as the government eliminated the disease from much of the country over the past 15 years, polio hotbeds stubbornly remained. Read more at at Foreign Affairs' Special Report: Global Public Health. That India is free of wild polio today is a testament to the commitment of the Indian government. I saw the fruits of that partnership firsthand in January, when I traveled to New Delhi as part of a U.S.
Register. Revealed: How Cold War Scientists Joined Forces to Conquer Polio. To many Americans, the cold war is ancient history. Yet only a few decades ago the planet was dangerously divided between West and East, and the antagonism between the U.S. and the Soviet Union defined global politics. Flare-ups such as the Korean “police action,” which killed millions of people in the early 1950s, and the Cuban missile crisis, 10 years later, drew the American and Soviet governments and their proxies to the threshold of nuclear war. At the same time, Americans lived in mortal fear of an enemy much closer to home. That enemy was polio—short for poliomyelitis, also known as infantile paralysis because of its prevalence among children and young adults. Scientists had known its cause—a virus spread via contact with fecal matter—since the 1930s, but its control eluded them. Select an option below: Customer Sign In *You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subscription to access this content.
Milestones in the Effort to Eradicate Polio [Timeline] Polio's Last Act. The shadows lengthen in a guesthouse cafeteria on the sprawling campus of christian Medical College, Vellore, in India. Wrapped up as he is in an issue that has possessed him for years, T. Jacob John notices neither the dying light nor the gathering mosquitoes.
He is talking about the oral polio vaccine. A slight man who speaks and moves with a speed that belies his 76 years, John is one of India’s leading polio experts. Trained as a pediatrician, virologist and microbiologist, he is also a longtime critic of the continued reliance on the oral polio vaccine—OPV in polio speak—used by the nearly 25-year-old international campaign to rid the planet of the paralyzing and sometimes fatal disease. The vaccine is at once an excellent and an imperfect tool. Inexpensive and easy to administer (each dose consists of a few drops of serum on the tongue), it has brought the world to the point where polio eradication is visible on the horizon.
Select an option below: Customer Sign In. Losing Polio - By Laurie Garrett. Last week, a Pakistani doctor was sentenced by his government to three decades in prison for actions that helped the United States kill Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, in far-off Geneva, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a state of emergency in its decades-long battle to eradicate polio. That these two events are intimately connected speaks volumes about new challenges -- political ones -- that threaten to undermine extraordinary global health achievements. A tribal court in Peshawar sentenced Dr. Shakil Afridi to 33 years' imprisonment for treason -- a penalty considered mild given that the nontribal Pakistani government courts would have ordered death by hanging for the same alleged crime.
Afridi collaborated with the CIA's efforts to determine if the secretive family residing behind high compound walls in Abbottabad in 2011 was the bin Laden clan, as U.S. officials suspected. Bin Laden was indeed inside the compound, which was raided by U.S. Alarm across Asia skyrocketed. Vaccine development: Man vs MRSA. Robert Daum has shown that MRSA is not confined to hospitals — and is determined to find a vaccine that will fight the bacterium. Over the years, Robert Daum has learned to respect his adversary. In 1995, he and his co-workers at the University of Chicago children's hospital in Illinois were investigating infections that had affected two dozen children in their emergency department.
Three children had fast-moving pneumonia. A fourth had an abscess the size of his fist buried in the muscle of one buttock. In a fifth, the bacterium had infiltrated the bones of one foot. Few researchers were willing to accept the implications. Daum, a paediatric infectious-disease physician and founder of the University of Chicago's MRSA Research Center, is still raising the alarm about the epidemic. This time, Daum's views have more support. “It is a provocative idea,” says Gerald Pier, a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who also works on S. aureus vaccines. Lucky break. Superfast drugs target shape-shifting enzymes - health - 13 March 2012. It all happens in a femtosecond – a quadrillionth of a second.
That's the time an enzyme needs to shape-shift into its most reactive form, trigger a chemical reaction and snap back into its original shape. We can now enter this high-speed world to interrupt the chemical reactions that sustain some of our deadliest pathogens and cause disease. Doing so could lead to antibiotics that won't trigger bacterial resistance. In 1946, Nobel laureate Linus Pauling suggested that enzymes are most active during fleeting transition states, but only recently has Vern Schramm at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Yeshiva University, New York, moved the science from the blackboard to the clinic.
"The problem in this whole field has been no one really knew what the structure of an enzyme's transition state looked like," he says. Over the course of a decade, Schramm has reconstructed those states, using computational and molecular modelling techniques. Lower dosage More From New Scientist. Should Science Pull the Trigger on Antiviral Drugs—That Can Blast the Common Cold? | Wired Science. The models of influenza, Ebola, and HIV viruses in this article were printed in 3-D and then destroyed. Orthomyxoviridae (influenza)Photo: Stan Musilek There’s a moment in the history of medicine that’s so cinematic it’s a wonder no one has put it in a Hollywood film. The scene is a London laboratory. The year is 1928. Alexander Fleming, a Scottish microbiologist, is back from a vacation and is cleaning up his work space. Fleming rescued the culture and carefully isolated the mold. No one at the time could have known how good penicillin was.
Of course, even if bacterial infections were totally eliminated, we would still get sick. We do currently have “antiviral” drugs, but they’re a pale shadow of their bacteria-fighting counterparts. Filoviridae (Ebola)Photo: Stan Musilek Viruses mutate much faster than bacteria, and so our current antivirals have a limited shelf life. Virologists, in other words, are still waiting for their Penicillin Moment. Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms Living Inside People's Brains | Infectious Diseases. Theodore Nash sees only a few dozen patients a year in his clinic at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. That’s pretty small as medical practices go, but what his patients lack in number they make up for in the intensity of their symptoms.
Some fall into comas. Some are paralyzed down one side of their body. Others can’t walk a straight line. Still others come to Nash partially blind, or with so much fluid in their brain that they need shunts implanted to relieve the pressure. Some lose the ability to speak; many fall into violent seizures. Underneath this panoply of symptoms is the same cause, captured in the MRI scans that Nash takes of his patients’ brains. A blob in the brain is not the image most people have when someone mentions tapeworms.
“Nobody knows exactly how many people there are with it in the United States,” says Nash, who is the chief of the Gastrointestinal Parasites Section at NIH. He puts a heavy emphasis on minimally. As Diseases Make Comeback, Why Aren't All Kids Vaccinated? Progress is easy to take for granted. When I was a child in the '60s, polio was history, measles was on the way out, and diphtheria and whooping cough were maladies out of old movies. Now these contagious diseases are making a comeback. Take measles, for instance. The disease used to infect 3 to 4 million Americans per year, hospitalizing nearly 50,000 people and causing 400 to 500 deaths. In 2000 a panel of experts convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proclaimed that measles transmission had been eradicated in the United States, except for imported cases.
The reason for these incidents—and for recent outbreaks of polio—is that the percentage of parents vaccinating their children has fallen, perhaps because some parents see no point in warding off diseases they've never encountered. Why would parents refuse to vaccinate their children against dangerous diseases? Only it's not that easy. But when people decide to forgo vaccination, they threaten the entire system.
Malaria may kill far more people than we thought - health - 03 February 2012. Drug-Resistant Malaria Spreads, Scientists Hunt Down Genetic Causes. Lyme Disease Pushes Northwards. 'Untreatable' gonorrhoea joins the infectious bogeymen - opinion - 08 March 2012. Antibiotic-resistant NDM-1 Is Undermining India's Medical Sector. Don't let up in war against antibiotic resistance - health - 30 April 2012. Return of the Clap. WHO demands action on drug-resistant gonorrhoea - health - 12 June 2012. Cave Bacteria Finding Suggests Ancient Origins of Antibiotic-Resistant Superbugs. Antibiotic Fails Sinus Infection Test.
Mutant protein may allow flu to kill - health - 26 March 2012. Fears over incurable TB deepen after retesting - health - 10 May 2012. Researcher death highlights dangers of pathogen work - health - 09 May 2012.