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Health News
Illinois allows HIV-positive people to donate organs

By
Jul. 23, 2004

pan class="textdark">CHICAGO (AP) — Illinois last week became the first state with a law specifically allowing HIV-positive people to donate organs to others with the virus, but for anyone to actually use the state law, federal rules will have to change. Currently, organs from HIV-infected patients are discarded to prevent them from being transplanted into uninfected patients and spreading the virus that causes AIDS. But those organs could prolong the lives of people who already have HIV, many of whom are living longer because of advances in medicine, said Dr. Patrick Lynch, a hepatologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital who helped write the legislation. “When those laws were originally put on the books, they made sense. HIV was, unfortunately, a death sentence back then,” Lynch said. “That doesn’t make sense anymore.” But before HIV-positive organ donations can be performed in Illinois, officials will have to work with the United Network for Organ Sharing — which coordinates the nation’s organ transplant system under contract with the government — to change U.S. Department of Health & Human Services regulations that prohibit it.

pan class="headerBlue">Scientist: No clear evidence that circumcision prevents HIV
pan class="textdark">BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — Male circumcision may have prevented HIV infection in some cases but the evidence is still not strong enough to make it a policy in the fight against AIDS, a leading researcher said last week. Recent evidence from a study in Uganda revealed that while no circumcised men in a test group got infected after having sex with HIV-positive women, nearly 17 percent who were not circumcised got infected, said Quarraisha Abdool Karim, an epidemiologist from University of Natal in South Africa. Some studies suggest that the mucous lining of the inner foreskin is more susceptible to HIV infection than that of a woman’s cervix. At the same time, the inner foreskin has glands that secrete an enzyme that kills HIV, she told a plenary session at the International AIDS Conference. She did not say how many men were tested in the Uganda study.

pan class="headerBlue">Activists heckle senior U.S. official at AIDS conference
pan class="textdark">BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — Shouting activists held up a speech last week by the top U.S. official on AIDS when they massed in front of the conference stage and tried to hand him a placard mocking Washington’s policy on HIV. Randall Tobias, the U.S. global AIDS coordinator, was at a podium to address the 15th International AIDS Conference but sat down to wait out the minutes-long protest before launching his speech, which drew near-constant heckling. “He’s lying,” the protesters chanted. “People dying.” The placard looked like a check for $15 billion — the amount the U.S. government has pledged over five years to help curb HIV and help its sufferers — but the check was made out to pharmaceutical companies and “right-wing” extremists. Conference organizers pleaded for calm, and the protesters sat down facing the audience during the speech. The activists say the U.S. funding comes with too many strings — requiring some of it to go toward programs emphasizing abstinence as the best policy against HIV transmission even though most experts say condoms are the best first line of defense.

pan class="headerBlue">One in 14 middle-aged black men in NYC have HIV or AIDS: report
pan class="textdark">NEW YORK (AP) — Black men between the ages of 40 and 54 are nearly three times as likely as other New Yorkers to have HIV or AIDS, according to a new report by the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene. Only gay and bisexual men and injecting drug users have higher rates of infection, said the report released last week at the International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, Thailand. Citywide, one of every 14 middle-aged black men are infected with the virus, the report found. In Manhattan alone, the infection rate is one in seven. Many middle-aged black men are not being tested in the early stages of infection and do not know they need treatment, the report said.

pan class="headerBlue">New study shows damage crystal meth does to brain
pan class="textdark">NEW YORK — Researchers released a study on the effects the popular gay party drug crystal methamphetamine has on the brain and it was worse than scientists expected to find, according to the New York Times. The first high-resolution MRI study of methamphetamine addicts shows a “forest fire of brain damage,” said Dr. Paul Thompson, an expert on brain mapping at the University of California Los Angeles. “We expected some brain changes but didn’t expect so much tissue to be destroyed.” The study, published in the June 30 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, shows the brain’s surface and deeper limbic system. The portion of the brain involved in drug craving, reward, mood and emotion lost 11 percent of its tissue, according to the Times. “The cells are dead and gone,” Thompson said. The study looked at 22 people in their 30s who had used the drug for at least 10 years and a control group. The addicts averaged weekly four grams of the drug, which is popular among gay club-goers, and had been high for 19 of the previous 30 days before testing began, the Times reported.