Jun 09, 2006   | COMMENTS     

UNITED NATIONS — Secretary General Kofi Annan said June 1 the world is losing the battle against HIV and AIDS, the New York Times reported. “The epidemic continues to outpace us,” he told a session of the General Assembly. “There are more new infections than ever before; more deaths than ever before; more women and girls infected than ever before.” If countries “don’t step up the fight drastically,” the world would not be able to “reverse the tide,” he said, calling the spread of the disease “the single greatest reversal in the history of human development.” The U.N. estimates that it needs $18 billion to combat AIDS in 2007 and $22 billion in 2008.

HIV’s ancestry traced back to wild chimps

WASHINGTON (AP) — Twenty-five years after the first AIDS cases emerged, scientists have confirmed that the HIV virus plaguing humans really did originate in wild chimpanzees, in a corner of Cameroon. Solving the mystery of HIV’s ancestry was dirty work. Scientists employed trackers to plunge through dense jungle and collect the fresh feces of wild apes — more than 1,300 samples in all. Before that, it took seven years of research just to develop the testing methods to genetically trace the primate version of the virus in living wild chimps without hurting the endangered species. Until now, “no one was able to look. No one had the tools,” said Dr. Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She led the team of international researchers that reported the success in the June 2 edition of the journal Science. “We’re 25 years into this pandemic,” Hahn said. “We don’t have a cure. We don’t have a vaccine. But we know where it came from.”

N.Y. officials, providers at odds on HIV test

NEW YORK (AP) — More than 100,000 New York City residents have HIV, and 20 percent don’t know it. New York City health officials want to reverse the trend by making it easier for doctors to administer HIV tests and to monitor the care of people who have the virus. But the issue has drawn outrage from AIDS service providers. The changes would abolish a requirement in New York for separate written consent for an HIV test and permit public health authorities to share information about matters such as viral load and drug resistance with an HIV patient’s doctor — information which can help doctors treat their patients effectively. “As long as HIV testing is different from all other testing in the medical care system it’s not going to be part of routine medical care,” said New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden.

S.F. grants to fund three lesbian health studies

SAN FRANCISCO — The Lesbian Health Fund, a program of San Francisco’s Gay & Lesbian Medical Association, is making three $10,000 grants to support lesbian health research, the San Francisco Business Times reported May 31. The Lesbian Health Fund has donated more than $450,000, often inspiring larger grants from other organizations. The $10,000 research grants go to Melissa Clark at Brown University for a project looking at health problems of unmarried middle-aged women, Carmen Poulin at the University of New Brunswick for a project on on the health of discharged lesbian service members and their partners; and Susan Jo Roberts at Northeastern University for research on lesbian cardiovascular risks. Recent research suggests lesbians may have risk factors like smoking, being overweight, hypertension and not exercising.

African nations to back male circumcision over HIV

UNITED NATIONS — Five southern African countries that have been hit hard by the AIDS pandemic want to encourage men to be circumcised after a study indicated that the procedure dramatically reduced the risk of HIV infection, the Times of London reported June 3. Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Tanzania and Zambia were holding talks with the U.N. AIDS agency on making circumcision more accessible to men as part of HIV prevention efforts, a U.N. AIDS adviser said. A three-year study involving 3,274 men age 18 to 24 in a South African township suggested that circumcision reduced the risk of contracting HIV by 60 percent. “What we showed was a dramatic effect. Those who were circumcised were protected against acquiring HIV,” said Adrian Purven, of the Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa, who led the study. So conclusive were the results that researchers stopped the study in July and offered circumcision to all the men.