Recently in General HIV/AIDS News Category

The government of The Gambia gave the most senior United Nations official in the country 48 hours to leave the country starting Friday, following remarks she made criticising Gambian President Yahya Jammeh’s widely-publicised cure for HIV/AIDS.

Dadzai Gwardzimba, UN Resident Coordinator in the capital Banjul, is due to travel to New York, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) said in a statement on Friday afternoon.

President Jammeh announced he had a cure for AIDS in January. It is reportedly made from herbs and bananas. He said he can eliminate the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from people living with the virus and heal people with AIDS in a matter of days. Footage of the president applying his treatment has been widely broadcast on state-run television.

The Cabinet has tentatively approved a $2.9 billion program aimed at raising the country's life expectancy by tackling AIDS, diabetes, tuberculosis and other diseases.

Health and Social Development Minister Mikhail Zurabov trumpeted the HIV portion of the program as "an essential step forward."

Under the program, the state would provide medical treatment for 30,000 people living with HIV. "A couple years ago, only 700 people with HIV or AIDS could get treatment," Zurabov told the Cabinet while presenting the five-year program Thursday.

Three patients at hospitals in Tuscany were mistakenly given organs from an HIV-positive donor, raising serious concerns about transplant procedures in Italy.

A 41-year-old woman's kidneys and liver were taken after she died of a brain hemorrhage at Florence's Careggi hospital and were implanted due "to a tragic human error," the hospital said in a statement Monday. The director of the regional transplants agency said the patients' chances of infection are high.

The HIV test on the organs had come back positive, but "unfortunately the expert who did the report wrote down 'negative' for all the tests, including this one," said Careggi director Mauro Marabini.

SPENDING on dedicated HIV and Aids programmes by national and provincial government departments will exceed R5bn within the next two years, according to today’s budget.

The Treasury says in its budget review that an additional R1,65bn has been committed to provinces over the next three years for their Aids treatment programmes.

The programmes are currently being run at 272 sites, and the health department says over 210,000 patients there are on antiretorviral (ARV) treatment.

Mobile phones will be used to help fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa, it was announced at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona.

A public-private partnership between five member groups of the mobile phone industry and the US government has formed the Phones for Health initiative.

Phones for Health is a $10m scheme aimed at using mobile phone coverage to strengthen health systems in 10 African countries.

Firms working on the project include the GSM Association, the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, Accenture, Motorola, MTN and Voxiva.

Over 9,000 youth will have access to counseling and guidance on HIV and AIDS prevention in Saint Petersburg through a project called 'Channeling Hope'. World Vision started the prevention activities earlier this month. More than 80 faith leaders and social workers will be involved in the project, trained by World Vision to support and better equip them to reach out to vulnerable youth.

The most vulnerable youths identified are aged between 14-24. This age group makes up almost one third of newly diagnosed HIV infec¬tions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, according to UNAIDS 2006 data.

In the United States, the HIV/AIDS epidemic is a health crisis for African Americans. At all stages of HIV/AIDS—from infection with HIV to death with AIDS—African Americans are disproportionately affected compared with members of other races and ethnicities [1, 2].

STATISTICS

HIV/AIDS in 2005

• According to the 2000 census, African Americans make up approximately 13% of the US population. However, in 2005, African Americans accounted for 18,510 (49%) of the estimated 38,096 new HIV/AIDS diagnoses in the United States in the 33 states with long-term, confidential name-based HIV reporting [2].*
• Of all African American men living with HIV/AIDS, the primary transmission category was sexual contact with other men, followed by injection drug use and high-risk heterosexual contact [2].
• Of all African American women living with HIV/AIDS, the primary transmission category was high-risk heterosexual contact, followed by injection drug use [2].
• Of the estimated 141 infants perinatally infected with HIV, 91 (65%) were African American (CDC, HIV/AIDS Reporting System, unpublished data, December 2006).
• Of the estimated 18,849 people under the age of 25 whose diagnosis of HIV/AIDS was made during 2001–2004 in the 33 states with HIV reporting, 11,554 (61%) were African American [3].

Five Bulgarian nurses condemned to death after being convicted of injecting Libyan children with the HIV virus that can cause AIDS have been accused of slandering police, their lawyer told AFP.

Othman al-Bizanti said the five face questioning on February 11 accused of "slander towards Libyan police officers" in relation to another case.

Their lawyer met the nurses on Monday and said they were "in a bad psychological state" after being told of the slander accusation.

An expert witness in the appeal of a HIV-positive man convicted of having unprotected sex with three women has been accused of misleading an Adelaide court.

Perth medical researcher Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos has told the South Australian Supreme Court of Appeal that HIV does not exist.

The AIDS dissident is one of two expert defence witnesses in an application to appeal the conviction of Andre Chad Parenzee, 35.

Parenzee was found guilty of endangering the lives of three woman last January because he did not tell them he had HIV and had unprotected sex with them.

by Peter Tremblay

Is AIDS an "accident of nature", or bio-terrorism created by a hideous intelligence? The cure to the worsening AIDS pandemic may lie in appreciating its origins. Are we as human beings, still such a self-destructive and barbaric species, that individuals or groups among us, would resort to such a prospective Crime Against Humanity?

Let's hope not, but a growing constituency of doctors as well as scientists are expressing alarm at statistics which suggest that AIDS is a "bio-weapon" designed to target population groups.

A striking feature of AIDS is that it has ethno-selective characteristics. The rate of infection is twice as high among Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans as among whites, with death coming two to three times as swiftly. And over 80% of the children with AIDS and 90% of infants born with it are among these minorities. "Ethnic weapons" that would strike certain racial groups more heavily than others have been a long-standing objectives of eugenics movements. (See - A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare by R. Harris and J. Paxman, p 265, Hill and Wang).