General HIV/AIDS News: January 2007 Archives

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).

By Michael McQuillan, NewsLeader

People who are HIV and AIDS positive suffer higher stress than most people. They also face stigma because of their disease. Those are two of the reasons the Purpose Society in New Westminster is now home to a comfort zone lounge.

“We wanted clients and the people who support them to come down and feel completely at ease,” said Edoye Porbeni, the project co-ordinator for Positive Spaces with the Lower Mainland Purpose Society.

“By having a safe, quiet space, this is a space where people can regroup and share their experiences with people who have the same struggles,” she said.

West Virginia has been able to eliminate its waiting list for free life-saving drugs for people infected with HIV.

That's progress well beyond that in many other states. In South Carolina, for example, more than 350 poor people infected with HIV are on a waiting list for the drugs. That's the longest such list in the country.

West Virginia's AIDS Drug Assistance Program was able to get rid of the waiting list earlier this fall, thanks to Medicare Part D coverage and state funds.

"Right now, we have a staff of case managers that work at Title III clinics at Charleston Area Medical Center, West Virginia University and other access points," said Jay Adams, HIV care coordinator for the state's division of surveillance and disease control.

AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest AIDS healthcare, prevention and education provider in the United States which operates free AIDS treatment clinics in the US, Africa, Latin America/Caribbean and Asia, has joined together in a groundbreaking new HIV/AIDS treatment and training initiative with China's Xinjiang Medical University (XMU) and the Xinjiang Medical University--Affiliated Hospital in Xinjiang Province, China.

The partnership will create a "Center of Excellence" -- a model for high-quality antiretroviral therapy (ART), medical training and a clinical preceptorship program in healthcare and medical management of HIV disease including the use of ART for persons living with HIV/AIDS -- at the Xinjiang Medical University--Affiliated Hospital in Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang Province. The collaboration, which will be known as the "AHF -- Xinjiang Medical University--Affiliated Hospital HIV/AIDS Treatment and Training Initiative", was recently formalized in a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between AHF and the respected Chinese medical institutions, and was celebrated in China in a formal dedication ceremony on December 26, 2006.

By Jose Antonio Vargas, Washington Post

In late August, barely a month into her new job, Marie Sansone of the District's AIDS agency was astounded by what she discovered: five boxes of unexamined HIV and AIDS cases that had not been touched in more than a year.

In the boxes were records of 2,000 to 3,000 cases that had yet to be entered in the city's database. The records are mostly from 2004 and 2005, some from 2003. Who's getting sicker, who needs treatment, who died. All boxed up.

"Oh, my goodness," Sansone, surveillance chief for the city's Administration for HIV Policy and Programs (AHPP), remembers saying.

 

By Linda B. Blackford, HERALD-LEADER

Michael Thompson, a Lexington actor and long-time survivor of AIDS who helped nourish thousands of Kentuckians with the same disease, died Monday. He was 51 and had been suffering from cancer.

Thompson founded Moveable Feast, which delivered hot meals to people in Central Kentucky suffering from HIV and AIDS, in 1998. He got the idea after nursing a destitute artist with AIDS who starved to death just a few blocks from Lexington’s city hall, said fellow activist and friend Robert Morgan.

The operation started in the basement of St. Augustine’s Church with one volunteer, Thompson himself. But thanks to his will and personality, it soon grew to an organization that still feeds 100 people a day. The group served its 100,000th meal just four years after it started.

HealthDay News -- Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the sexually transmitted virus that causes AIDS.

Symptoms of infection vary, even between women and men.

Here's a list of common warning signs of HIV in women, courtesy of Epigee Women's Health:

Chronic vaginal or oral yeast infections. Persistent fever or frequent night sweats. Bruising easily. Exhaustion. Rashes on the body. Extreme weight loss. Purple-colored lesions on skin or mouth. Persistent diarrhea for one month or longer.

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on Friday defended a court's decision to sentence five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death for infecting more than 400 children with HIV, but said mystery surrounded the case.

"It is unimportant that the medics are sentenced to death or not -- if they committed a crime and are sentenced to death, that is the court's decision," Gaddafi told a gathering of officials, religious leaders and reporters in Tripoli.

"The important thing is why the medical team injected the children with AIDS. Who ordered you -- was it Libyan intelligence, American intelligence, Israeli intelligence or Bulgarian intelligence? This is what we have to find out."