1 September 2017 VOLUME 18 ISSUE 35

Dozens of young men and women with HIV gathered recently to celebrate...AIDS.Center, the clinic that...gives people a place to speak openly about their health conditions and receive psychological help and medical consultations. Dr. Yelena Orlova-Morozova...[who] helped found AIDS.Center, says: "Ignorance and poor state policy cause the epidemic’s growth. I don’t think we’d be able to control the developing epidemic anytime soon, as people do not want to be educated about AIDS."

With the rising number of people living with HIV in the Philippines,...UN Asia Pacific Director Eammon Murphy said the country needs to..."re-energize" its response to HIV. He also commented on the "old-school" way of testing in the country....In the past six years, Murphy said more than 10,000 people "became infected with HIV....You compare that 6 years before, it was only 4,000, so it's a dramatic increase in a short time."

Most of the United States’ special envoys will be abolished, their responsibilities reassigned as part of the State Department overhaul, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Congress Monday....[The] administration plans to keep envoys for religious freedom, fighting anti-Semitism and LGBT rights...[and] will keep envoys or at-large ambassadors for women’s issues, hostages, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, human trafficking, HIV/AIDS and Holocaust issues.

Religious young women are less knowledgeable about a vaccine that guards against several different types of cancer, suggests a new study from Utah. Compared to women who didn’t practice a religion, those who did were nearly 60 percent less likely to know about the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine and about half as likely to have received at least one dose.

There is a lot we don’t know about trans women’s HIV risk, why they are so vulnerable to HIV and who trans women are acquiring HIV from. A study presented at IAS 2017... uncovered another mystery:...whether there is a hidden population of heterosexual men who have sex with trans women and are themselves at high risk of acquiring and transmitting HIV. One thing the study did make clear...is that a lot of HIV infections in trans women may be due to injecting drugs rather than sex.

It has been rare for a major company to take the leading role in propelling a vaccine candidate toward efficacy testing. The only example to date [is]...Merck’s adenovirus serotype 5 (Ad5) vector,...ultimately discontinued after being associated with enhanced…risk of HIV acquisition....Given Merck’s cautionary tale, it is all the more notable that Janssen Vaccines and Prevention B.V. is rapidly advancing an experimental prime-boost HIV vaccine to...a large-scale “proof of concept” efficacy trial in women in late 2017/early 2018.

The Global Health Supply Chain Procurement Supply Management contract is a $9.5 billion effort implemented by Chemonics International [that] coordinates a supply chain for lifesaving commodities such as HIV tests and treatments, malaria drugs, and high-tech laboratory equipment, [and] supports the U.S. government’s largest and most important global health initiatives....In its latest quarterly report, Chemonics disclosed that only 7 percent of shipments delivered through the project arrived on time and in full.

Defying U.S. safety protections for human trials, an American university and a group of wealthy libertarians, including a prominent Donald Trump supporter, are backing the offshore testing of an experimental herpes vaccine...on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts....Most of the 20 participants were Americans with herpes who were flown to the island several times to be vaccinated, according to Rational Vaccines, the company that oversaw the trial.

Scaling back aid to South Africa and Côte d'Ivoire would increase projected HIV transmissions by 0.5% to 19.4% and deaths by 0.6% to 39.1% over a decade, Rochelle Walensky, Massachusetts General Hospital, and colleagues....reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine...."Over the past decade and a half, we've spent considerably more money to save lives in these and other African nations. Would the relatively small savings realized by currently proposed budget reductions be worth these large humanitarian costs?"

Zambia is moving forward with mandatory HIV testing for all patients who visit government health facilities, Health Minister Chitalu Chilufya told The Lancet, confirming President Edgar Lungu's surprise announcement of the new policy in mid-August. The move appears to contradict WHO recommendations against mandatory or coerced testing. And it has sparked an outcry among international and local HIV activists, who are pushing the government to reverse its decision.

In an updated position paper, the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine argue[s] that while abstinence can be a healthy choice, adolescents should decide for themselves when they're ready to initiate sex, and that young people have a right to "accurate and complete information" to become empowered about their sexual choices through comprehensive sexuality education programs. Prominent children's and women's health organizations have already agreed in part with these findings.

The detected circulating HBV genotype A in Nairobi reflects its possible spread in the population with its origin being within the country. We suggest that patients should not be on lamivudine monotherapy....[but] managed on combination of tenofovir plus lamivudine or emtricitabine therapy to prevent emergence of HBV drug resistant variants alongside a continuous surveillance monitoring of drug resistance.

Newark, New Jersey, is disproportionately affected by HIV with one of the highest prevalence rates in the United States. Rutgers New Jersey Medical School is a major healthcare provider to Newark’s underserved population and implemented a HIV testing program that can diagnose and link newly diagnosed individuals to care....This study demonstrates that, even in a high prevalence institution with HIV counseling, testing, and referral service, HIV screening is lacking at multiple points of care.