HIV Treatment: November 2006 Archives

World AIDS Day will be Friday, Dec. 1. Established by the World Health Organization in 1988, World AIDS Day serves to focus global attention on the devastating impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Weld County has the fastest growing HIV rate in the eight-county service region of the Northern Colorado AIDS Project. As of June 30, there were 130 people living with HIV or AIDS in Weld County.

In October the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised the recommendations for HIV testing for the general public. CDC believes that everyone should know whether or not they are infected with HIV because there are important health benefits to this knowledge. People who are HIV negative can take steps to stay that way and those who are infected with HIV can get treatment to improve health and extend life. They can also change their behaviors in order to reduce the chance of passing the virus on to others.

MOSCOW (AFP) - Only about 10 percent of Russia's officially estimated 341,000 HIV-positive patients received treatment in 2005 with antiretroviral drugs to slow down the development of AIDS, a senior health official said.

"Last year only 3,500 people received treatment with these drugs," Vadim Pokrovsky, director of the federal centre for preventing and fighting AIDS, said according to Russian news agencies.

"In many regions there are no doctors qualified" to administer the treatment and the number of specialist medical centres is inadequate, he said.

The number of HIV-positive Russians has now risen to 357,918 according to official figures but Pokrovsky thinks the real figure is thee times higher.

Antiretroviral therapy can keep HIV infection in check and delay and ameliorate the symptoms of HIV/AIDS. However, the drugs do not manage to eradicate the virus completely; individuals have to stay on the drugs permanently. Preclinical studies in mice by Ekatarina Dadachova and colleagues (Albert Einstein College of Medicine) published in the international open-access journal PLoS Medicine now suggest a new strategy to locate and kill many if not all HIV-infected cells in the body.

Radioimmunotherapy refers to an approach pioneered by cancer researchers in which patients are injected with antibodies against specific molecules characteristic of cancer cells (or in this case, HIV-infected cells) which carry a radioactive isotope. The approach takes advantage of the antibody's ability to rapidly hone in on its target cells and deliver the radioactive payload which then selectively kills the target cells and any HIV particles within it.

The first test of a potential new gene therapy for HIV _ the virus that causes AIDS _ was encouraging enough for researchers to launch a more extensive trial.

'The goal of this phase I trial was safety and feasibility, and the results established that,' said lead researcher Dr. Carl June. 'But the results also hint at something much more.'

In addition to showing that the treatment was possible and didn't endanger the patients, the amount of virus in the subjects remained steady or decreased during the study, which involved just five people with chronic HIV infection.