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16 DECEMBER 2022 VOLUME 24 ISSUE 50

Media Coverage

  • Don’t Rewrite History

    An op-ed by Rep. Barbara Lee: On December first, we celebrated World AIDS Day. World AIDS Day is a time to acknowledge the results of our investments in fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic, remember those we have lost in the struggle against this disease, and stand in solidarity with the millions across the globe who continue to fight against it. During the week of celebration, I had the privilege of attending several events to commemorate this momentous occasion.

    December 15, 2022
    General
    Medium

  • Opinion: Beyond the Buzz Words: ‘DEI’ and ‘Decolonizing’ Global Health

    Diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, has gained significant attention over the past few years in the global health and development space. As more organizations commit to DEI in their workplaces, the discussions around “decolonization” in relation to international development and humanitarian aid have also been elevated.

    December 14, 2022
    General
    Devex

  • Africa: Mpox, AIDS and COVID-19 Show the Challenges of Targeting Public Health Messaging to Specific Groups Without Causing Stigma

    During infectious disease outbreaks, clinicians and public health officials are tasked with providing accurate guidance for the public on how to stay safe and protect themselves and their loved ones. However, sensationalized media coverage can distort how the public perceives new emerging infections, including where they come from and how they spread. This can foster fear and stigma, especially toward communities that are already mistrustful of the health care system.

    December 14, 2022
    General
    allAfrica

  • US Preventive Services Task Force recommends PrEP for HIV prevention

    The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), an independent panel of medical prevention experts, granted PrEP for HIV infection an A grade on Tuesday, recommending that health care providers offer or provide this service to their patients who have an increased risk of contracting the virus. The USPSTF maintains its own five-letter grading system for medical services based on the level of certainty that it has regarding the net benefit gained. An “A” grade indicates that the organization has a “high certainty” that the benefits offered by a service are “substantial.”

    December 14, 2022
    PrEP
    The Hill

  • ‘Failure To Take Medication Responsible for HIV/AIDS Deaths in Nigeria’

    The Director General of the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA), Dr Gambo Aliyu, has said failure to take medication is responsible for the number of deaths the country is recording now from HIV/AIDS. He noted that HIV/AIDS is one of the longest epidemic in human history that has defiled herbal scientific solution to wipe it away once and for all but, the scientific world has found solution around HIV through the development of antiretroviral drugs which work by stopping the virus replicating in the body.

    December 14, 2022
    Treatment
    The Guardian

  • Urban, Rural Physicians Differ in HIV Prevention Efforts

    HIV remains a major public health concern in the United States, with adolescents and young adults (15-24 years old) making up around 20 percent of new infections in the nation each year. Prevention is key to stopping HIV, and the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in recent years gave high-risk people a new and effective tool to protect their health.

    December 13, 2022
    General
    Mirage News

  • 7 Things You Need To Know About How HIV Treatment Is Changing in South Africa Accreditation

    From April 2023, everyone with HIV who is older than four weeks (and who weighs more than three kilograms) will be able to go on a treatment plan that includes the antiretroviral (ARV) drug, dolutegravir, according to Thato Chidarikire, the health department’s acting head of HIV programmes. Chidarikire was speaking at a Bhekisisa webinar on 7 December, during which the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society (SAHCS) previewed its 2023 (private sector) treatment guidelines for adults and children, which should also be available to the public early next year.

    December 13, 2022
    Treatment
    news24

  • Men Who Stay, Men Who Leave – What Helps Ugandan Women Living With HIV Stay With Their Partners?

    Almost 25 percent of pregnant and postpartum women living with HIV in Uganda separated from their male partners during a study investigating reasons for separation among HIV-affected couples. Researchers from the Infectious Diseases Institute, Makerere University, recently published these findings in AIDS and Behavior. Women who were unmarried, in a non-cohabitating relationship, in a polygamous relationship or a short relationship (less than one year) were more likely to separate. HIV non-disclosure and unmet gender expectations also triggered separation.

    December 13, 2022
    General
    aidsmap

  • Unlocking An Immunity Mystery: Why Are HIV Rates Lower In Circumcised Men?

    How men catch HIV during exposure through their penises is one of the least studied aspects of HIV transmission, but South African immunology researcher Dr Cosnet Lerato Rametse and her collaborators are looking for answers. Rametse, who is currently a doctoral researcher at the University of Cape Town, Division of Immunology, says that her work aims to characterize the immune environment within the penis and whether these immune factors are impacted by circumcision.

    December 13, 2022
    Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision
    Forbes

  • ‘Extremely Concerning’ Syphilis Cases on the Rise, but Other STIs Trend Down

    A spike in syphilis cases, especially among young Australian women, has health experts very worried over the infection's potential impact on pregnancies. Also concerning, according to a new report from UNSW's Kirby Institute, is that most sexually transmissible infections (STI) remain undiagnosed and untreated across the country, which researchers say highlights the urgent need to increase testing. In 2021, according to data, there were 86,916 diagnoses of chlamydia, 26,577 gonorrhea cases and 5570 recorded infections of syphilis.

    December 13, 2022
    General
    9News

  • Long-Acting Injectable PrEP as HIV Prevention Scores an A Grade

    Long-acting injectable PrEP to prevent HIV received an A grade in an updated draft recommendation issued today by the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), an independent panel of health care experts. The grade is important because the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare) requires that private insurers and ACA-approved health plans cover preventive services that receive an A or B grade from the USPSTF. This means that injectable PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) will be available to more people and without cost-sharing.

    December 13, 2022
    PrEP
    POZ Magazine

  • HIV Researchers Made a Big Leap This Month

    On the first day of December, World AIDS Day, a team of researchers behind an HIV vaccine trial published exciting results in Science. Their findings signaled a significant advance in the quest for a vaccine that could eventually protect humanity from a virus without a cure that still infects more than a million people each year. That vaccine remains beyond the horizon, but the researchers were able to crack a puzzle that’s been stumping scientists since the 1990s.

    December 13, 2022
    General
    GQ

  • Indonesia To Produce Merck’s HPV Vaccines to Combat Cervical Cancer

    Indonesia will produce drugmaker Merck & Co's vaccines for human papillomavirus (HPV), the chief of its state-owned pharmaceutical company Bio Farma said on Tuesday, in a bid to combat HPV-linked cervical cancer in the country. Cervical cancer is the fourth-most common cancer among women globally, with an estimated 604,000 new cases and 342,000 deaths in 2020, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). About 90 percent of new cases and deaths worldwide occurred in low- and middle-income countries that year.

    December 13, 2022
    HPV Vaccines
    Reuters

  • Why Is It So Hard To Make a Vaccine for HIV? Plus, Why RSV Infections Came Early This Year.

    December is HIV/AIDS Awareness month. How far has treatment and prevention come? Why is there still no vaccine against HIV, when it was possible to develop a vaccine against COVID so quickly? What is it about the human immunodeficiency virus that has thwarted scientists for almost 40 years?

    December 12, 2022
    General
    WYPR

  • CAB-LA's Full Potential for HIV Prevention Hits Snags

    Long-acting injectable cabotegravir (CAB-LA) has the potential to fill the gaps for people at high risk for sexually transmitted HIV who have trouble taking oral preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP), but several factors stand in the way of a widespread roll-out, say authors of a new review article. CAB-LA "represents the most important breakthrough in HIV prevention in recent years," write Geoffroy Liegeon, MD, and Jade Ghosn, MD, PhD, with Université Paris Cité, in Paris, France, in this month's HIV Medicine.

    December 12, 2022
    PrEP
    Medscape

  • Widespread Implementation of Long-Acting PrEP for HIV May Be Stifled By High Price Tag, Say Researchers

    Although a long-acting injectable for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has the potential to change the game of HIV prevention, wide-spread implementation of the treatment in resource-limited countries may be stifled by its price, according to the authors of a new study published in The Lancet. Following the FDA approval of cabotegravir in 2021, the researchers highlighted the timeliness of their findings as governments and donor agencies in low- and middle-income countries contemplate replacing oral PrEP or augmenting the approach with long-acting treatment.

    December 12, 2022
    PrEP
    Pharmacy Times

  • Lifelong Access to Antiretrovirals Nearly Eliminates Risk for Vertical HIV Transmission

    In Tanzania, pregnant women with HIV who had access to antiretroviral therapy for life had less than a 2 percent risk for vertical transmission, according to data published in The Lancet HIV. Although 84 percent of pregnant Tanzanian women with HIV had access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) in 2020, the estimated risk for vertical transmission was 11.1 percent, according to study background.

    December 12, 2022
    Treatment
    Healio

  • Blue Cross & Blue Shield Accused of Discrimination by HIV Advocates

    Two separate complaints have been filed against the North Carolina Blue Cross and Blue Shield claiming discrimination against HIV patients. The suits, filed by the HIV+Hepatitis Policy Institute and the North Carolina AIDS Action Network, claim the insurance company places almost all HIV drugs, including generic PrEP, on the highest drug tier. This effectively causes those living with and vulnerable to HIV to pay the excessively high costs for their drugs.

    December 11, 2022
    General
    Plus Magazine

  • Monkeypox Exposure in Patients Living With HIV (PLWH): Epidemiological and Clinical Significance and a Summary of Response Recommendations

    The recent monkeypox outbreak in non-endemic areas, a potentially global epidemic raised by the World Health Organization (WHO) on May 21, 2022, has inflicted nearly 80 thousand patients as of November 10, 2022. Although it has not been considered a sexually transmitted disease and almost anyone can contract the disease through mostly close contact, homosexuals, bisexuals, and MSM comprise most of the monkeypox cases. On the other hand, the Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a common co-infection among this group.

    December 11, 2022
    General
    New Microbes and New Infections

  • Investigational HBV Treatment Moves Goal from Suppression to Cure

    Bepirovirsen, an antisense RNA-based investigational agent, exerted effects possibly consistent with functional cure of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection in some participants of a multi-national phase 2 trial. The agent sustained the primary efficacy measures of reducing hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) below the lower limit of detection (0.05 IU/ml) and HBV DNA level below the lower limit of quantification (20 IU/ml) for 24 weeks after treatment in approximately 10 percent of the trial participants with chronic HBV infection.

    December 10, 2022
    General
    Contagion Live

  • Free Condoms: France Is Making Condoms Available to All Young People After Learning a Startling Percentage of Its Population Doesn’t Use Protection

    France will make free condoms available to all young people starting in January in an effort to curb the country's increasing rate of sexually transmitted infections, President Emmanuel Macron announced Friday. Macron announced the new measure in a Twitter video on Friday. The move is part of a larger health iniative meant to improve public access to personal healthcare, including contraception and STI screening.

    December 9, 2022
    General
    Yahoo News

  • High-Resistance Therapy Options for Treatment-Naïve Patients With HIV

    Joseph Eron, MD, Daniel R. Kuritzkes, MD, and Monica Gandhi, MD, MPH, discuss the likelihood of other combination regimens for the treatment of multidrug-resistant HIV, including monoclonal antibodies.

    December 9, 2022
    Treatment
    Contagion Live

  • HIV-Positive People Are Protected by COVID-19 Vaccines

    People infected with HIV who receive antiretroviral therapy form antibodies against Sars-Cov-2 after being vaccinated against COVID-19 with mRNA vaccines. Their immune response to the vaccination is, however, less strong than that of healthy people. A third vaccination reduces this gap. These results emerged from a study with a total of 91 participants conducted by a research team led by Professor Ingo Schmitz, head of the Department of Molecular Immunology at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.

    December 9, 2022
    General
    News Medical

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