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19 May 2017 VOLUME 18 ISSUE 20

Media Coverage

  • US pledges $526 million aid in 2017 to Tanzania to fight AIDS

    The funds were donated through the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief....The financial assistance represents a 12 percent increase over last year’s budget and will also support HIV testing for 8.6 million Tanzanians, provide treatment to an estimated 360,000 people who newly test positive.,...support care and treatment of orphans and vulnerable children and voluntary medical male circumcision to further prevent HIV transmission.

    May 18, 2017
    Reuters

  • Advocacy in uncertain times: HIV vaccine awareness day turns 20

    How, in the midst of it all, do we advocate for an HIV vaccine?...We do it by advancing a near-, mid- and long-term agenda with passion and precision....In today’s shrinking budgets..., the absolute minimum for donors must be holding fast to current levels....AVAC and fellow advocates call on the vaccine field to show accountability by data-driven, collaborative, transparent decisions about which candidates advance;...hard discussions about trials in the era of other prevention options; [and] ensuring swift, ethical conduct of trials.

    May 18, 2017
    HIV Vaccine
    Huffington Post

  • Ex-NIH director warns mooted Trump funding cuts would ‘disembowel’ U.S. research institutions

    President Donald Trump is considering switching his attack on...research budgets by capping how much the NIH can spend on indirect costs....The question is how deep the NIH can cut without damaging research....The wide range of rates of indirect costs provided by the NIH has raised eyebrows in the past. And the fact the...Gates Foundation has a 10% cap on indirect costs has added to some people’s belief that the NIH provides too much money..Others...are less sanguine.

    May 18, 2017
    Fierce Biotech

  • Lawmakers decry Trump plan to slash NIH 2018 budget

    Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives...avoided asking NIH Director Francis Collins for his thoughts, perhaps knowing it would put him in a very uncomfortable spot....Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) asked NIH officials to explain the role of the Fogarty International Center, which the Trump proposal would eliminate. [NIAID Director] Anthony Fauci...reeled off examples of how Fogarty has trained health experts in Africa and South America to fight diseases such as HIV and Zika that are threats to the United States.

    May 17, 2017
    Science

  • Vaccine may cut HPV infections, an oral cancer risk, in men

    The HPV vaccine that helps prevent cervical cancer in women also might lower the risk in young men of oral infections that can cause mouth and throat cancers, a new study finds....This is the first study of whether the vaccine might prevent oral HPV infections in young men, and the results suggest it can.

    May 17, 2017
    AP

  • The White House's new war on drugs could drive up the HIV rate

    The new policy is expected to increase the prison population and punish minority groups, particularly African Americans, that have been disproportionately subjected to mandatory minimums for minor drug crimes. But there’s a looming, and less obvious, side effect of this new directive: The White House’s “tough on crime” approach is almost certainly going to exacerbate the spread of infectious diseases like HIV.

    May 17, 2017
    Treatment
    VOX

  • Trump reportedly considering new cuts to biomedical research

    The administration is contemplating a cap on what the NIH spends on overhead—a move critics say will “disembowel” many research institutes....According to two sources within the NIH briefed on the issue, the administration may pursue a new strategy in its quest for cuts, by proposing a 10 percent cap on the NIH’s indirect costs—the money it gives to grantees to support administration, equipment, libraries, IT, lighting, heating, electricity, and other overhead.

    May 17, 2017
    The Atlantic

  • Senate GOP won't back Trump's deep spending cuts, McConnell says

    President Donald Trump’s proposal for $54 billion in domestic spending cuts in the next fiscal year reflects priorities that “aren’t necessarily ours,” and he can expect a Republican-led Senate to make changes, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday.

    May 17, 2017
    Bloomberg

  • Male HPV vaccination rates remain low

    Rates of vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV) remain exceedingly low in American males. In an analysis of NHANES data, only 7.9% of males were vaccinated, and that figure wasn't appreciably higher in the age 18-29 group -- where vaccination efforts are targeted -- at a rate of 13.4%, Michael Daugherty, MD, a resident at SUNY Upstate Medical University, reported at the American Urological Association meeting in Boston.

    May 17, 2017
    MedPage Today

  • Gottlieb tells staffers FDA can help—indirectly—to cut medicine prices

    New FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb delivered his first address yesterday, and tackling high drug prices featured prominently....Among other actions...is re-organization of FDA's 4,000 inspectors so they focus on a particular product category rather than a geographic area....The reshuffle...won't result in reduction in headcount;...teams will be re-organized within specialist offices focusing on pharmaceutical quality, medical devices, tobacco, food, biologics, drugs including vaccines, and research.

    May 16, 2017
    Fierce Biotech

  • Editorial: The ‘global gag rule’ on abortion just got much bigger — and much worse

    The consequences...will be catastrophic....Developing countries have spent the past decade revamping their health systems so patients can get many types of ..care in one place. That means organizations will have to choose between abandoning clients in need of abortions and losing the funding they need to fight tuberculosis, malaria, and more. PEPFAR's inclusion will deal a heavy blow to HIV prevention efforts....Worse still, judging from past experience, the policy may not even achieve its aim...

    May 16, 2017
    Washington Post

  • PAS 2017: Many doctors wary of providing PrEP for young patients

    Only about a third of family practice and pediatric providers said they would be likely to prescribe HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to adolescent patients, underlining the need to educate providers outside the HIV and sexually transmitted disease fields, according to a report at the 2017 Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting last week in San Francisco.

    May 16, 2017
    PrEP
    HIV and Hepatitis

  • How Black moms and daughters can fight to reduce HIV Rates

    Through progressive and thoughtful interventions such as Project DASH (Divas Against the Spread of HIV/AIDS), African-American women infected with HIV/AIDS are using empowerment and education to manage their diagnoses....Project DASH is a mixed-methods study that explores the relationship and communication between daughters and their HIV-positive mothers as predictors of sexual behaviors and HIV risk of the daughters.

    May 16, 2017
    The Root

  • Broad support for a Trump foreign aid nominee, with a catch

    Mark Green is a rare bird in Washington these days — a Donald Trump nominee with broad bipartisan support. But there’s a catch to his potential posting as administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The agency faces a starkly uncertain future, including potentially big budget cuts and the possibility of being folded entirely into a restructured State Department.

    May 16, 2017
    AP News

  • How HIV became a matter of international security

    Governments around the world were slow to get to grips with HIV/AIDS. But a big change came when they started understanding it not just as a health issue but as a security threat too. Alexandra Ossola investigates.

    May 16, 2017
    Mosaic

  • Two dose HPV vaccine effective in treating genital warts, study finds

    New research offers the first published clinical evidence to support new recommendations by the CDC for a two-dose HPV vaccine to prevent genital warts. Research from the Boston University Medical Center, published online in Sexually Transmitted Diseases, found that the two-dose human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine provides the same level of protection against genital warts as three doses, when given as directed.

    May 15, 2017
    Science Daily

  • Researchers see a path to end HIV epidemic

    With a sustained emphasis on prevention, detection and treatment, the nation's HIV epidemic could reach the beginning of the end in 2025, according to new projections from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. That's the year when new infections could decline enough that the number of people living with the disease would also start to decline.

    May 15, 2017
    Baltimore Sun

  • Global health spending good for U.S. security and economy, National Academies say

    If a serious infectious disease blossomed across the globe today, the U.S. death toll could be double that of all casualties suffered in wars since the American Revolution,...just one sobering statistic cited in a report released today by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine....[Its] authors make 14 recommendations for intervening in global health across four broad areas,...[including] sustaining funds for responding to AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.

    May 15, 2017
    Science

  • Thought Starter: Filling the gaps in HIV prevention research

    The pursuit of an HIV vaccine and other separate tools to prevent transmission traditionally have been siloed individually in discreet administrative organizations....Yet, research on a vaccine increasingly intersects with other prevention modalities. These new and increasingly important intersections require thoughtful approaches for the future. In this blog post, Dr. Carl Dieffenbach, Director of NIAID’s Division of AIDS, looks ahead to plans that integrate vaccine research into a broader HIV prevention research context.

    May 12, 2017
    HIV Vaccine
    NIH/NIAID

  • Ideological divide over abortion again affects US foreign aid

    Restoring the "Mexico City policy” was expected when a Republican administration took over this year...following eight years of Democratic control of the White House. What was not expected was how vigorously Trump would expand the scope of the anti-abortion rule. He broadened the policy to affect about $9.5 billion in U.S. global health aid...Organizations working on AIDS, malaria, or maternal and child health will have to make sure that none of their programs involves so much as an abortion referral.

    May 12, 2017
    VOA

  • Foreign-aid advocates and fiscal hawks all like Trump’s nominee to head USAID

    Mark A. Green serves as a rebuttal to the hyper-partisanship of Washington. From across the ideological spectrum came effusive praise for the Trump administration’s announcement Wednesday that it will nominate the former Republican congressman from Wisconsin and ex-ambassador to Tanzania to head the U.S. Agency for International Development.

    May 12, 2017
    Washington Post

  • Editorial: The curse of uncertainty

    Proposed US budget cuts and the impending exit of the UK from the European Union have the potential to destabilize the global biomedical-research enterprise. In the meantime, the uncertainty of not knowing just how bad the effects will be will inflict its own damage.

    May 5, 2017
    Nature

Published Research

  • SIECUS State Profiles Fiscal Year 2016

    The SIECUS State Profiles: Fiscal Year 2016 Edition i [provides] individual profiles of adolescent sexual health promotion programs and abstinence-only-until-marriage federal funding and programs in all 50 US states, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, and the outer US Territories, [and includes specific] information on Sex/Sexuality and HIV/STD Education Laws by State.

    May 17, 2017
    SIECUS

  • HIV and the criminalisation of drug use among people who inject drugs: a systematic review

    Among the 106 studies included in this review, 85 (80%) suggested that drug criminalisation has a negative effect on HIV prevention and treatment, 10 (9%) suggested no association, five (5%) suggested a beneficial effect, one (1%) suggested both beneficial and negative effects, and five (5%) suggested both null and negative effects. Our results provide an objective evidence base to support numerous international policy initiatives to reform legal and policy frameworks criminalising drug use.

    May 14, 2017
    Lancet

  • Antibody to HSV gD peptide induced by vaccination does not protect against HSV-2 infection in HSV-2 seronegative women

    We assessed whether vaccine-induced anti-gD antibodies protected females against HSV-2 acquisition in RV144. Conclusions: AIDSVAX B/E containing gD did not confer protection from HSV-2 acquisition in HSV-2 seronegative women, despite eliciting anti-gD serum antibodies.

    May 11, 2017
    Antibody Related Research
    PLoS

  • Interrupting antiretroviral treatment in HIV cure research: scientific and ethical considerations

    The ultimate test for assessing whether investigational interventions have resulted in HIV remission or eradication is to interrupt standard ART in a carefully controlled clinical trial setting.....The lack of definitive assays for measuring viral reservoirs not only makes research on HIV remission or cure challenging, it also affects the ability to assess risks from [analytic treatment interruptions/ATIs] themselves....[Here]...we outline ethical standards for HIV cure research involving ATIs.

    April 30, 2017
    Virus Eradication

  • Prospecting for an HIV vaccine

    Conclusion: Insights from these various research efforts are...critically important.,...[and require] continued investment in the capabilities that allow such work....HIV vaccine research has become an innovating engine for vaccine research generally, as demonstrated by the varied vaccine vector-derived products employed in trials for other pathogens that are grounded in HIV vaccine development. With continued focus, we will develop a globally effective HIV vaccine.

    March 24, 2017
    HIV Vaccine
    Tropical Diseases, Travel Medicine and Vaccines

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