23 September 2016 VOLUME 17 ISSUE 38

As part of the investment, the couple is funding a $600 million research center in San Francisco called the Biohub, a partnership with UC San Francisco, Stanford University and UC Berkeley,...which is embarking on its first two research projects: The Cell Atlas...and the Infectious Disease Initiative, which will explore new approaches and develop new tools for creating drugs, diagnostic tests and vaccines that could aid the fight against such threats as HIV, Ebola and Zika.

Despite "very low to moderate" uptake of the human papillomavirus vaccine, it is having a substantial impact in reducing anogenital warts, one of HPV's most common symptoms....The annual prevalence of anogenital warts has fallen significantly among young women and adolescent girls, and...also among young men, suggesting there might be a herd effect of vaccinating young women.

UN Women has come under fire from rights activists for launching an online consultation on its sex worker policy that will exclude the opinion of thousands of people in poorer countries. The Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP) said many of the sex workers affected by any UN policy change live...where access to the internet remains low,...and also criticised...the short timescale of the six-week consultation...and [its] bureaucratic language.

President Obama asked Congress for $1.9 billion to address the Zika crisis back in February. But...renewed fights in Congress over Planned Parenthood have tripped up Zika funding bills. Fauci said that if the battles aren’t resolved by the start of the new fiscal year (Oct. 1), “We’re going to have to stop what we’re doing.” The consequences of such an action are huge.

Bisexual men have long been saddled with a 'down low' mythology and an enduring stigma that makes women fear them as a source of HIV infection. Turns out, research shows this fear may be based on a lot of false assumptions.

A global fund has raised over $12.9 billion from international donors as part of a campaign aimed at effectively eradicating AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis by 2030, conference organizers said...."We can declare success for we have saved the lives of 8 million people in the coming years," Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters after attending the conference, which drew several heads of state, singer Bono and Microsoft Corp co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates.

Microbiologist Jonathan Eisen took one look at the speaker lineup for a prestigious conference on precision medicine in Silicon Valley and decided he wouldn’t attend. Yes, top scientists in the field will be speaking. But the vast majority of them happen to be white men....Hilda Bastian, academic editor and blogger at PLOS Medicine...urged conference organizers to look beyond gender and aim for racial and ethnic diversity, too....Fewer than 15 percent of speakers appeared to be people of color.

Opt-out HIV testing in accident and emergency departments in areas of high HIV prevalence is likely to save NHS trusts money..., according to presentations at the British HIV Association conference in Manchester last week....Although national guidelines have recommended [such] testing...since 2008, financial pressures have discouraged local NHS managers from implementing the policy.

From 2009 to 2013, HIV-infected pregnant women were enrolled from 6 antenatal clinics (ANC) in Nairobi, Kenya and followed with their infants until 6 weeks postpartum. Among 830 enrolled women, 62.5% consented to male participation and 26.2% of men attended the ANC. Adjusting for antiretroviral use, the risk of death or infection remained significantly greater for infants born to mothers without male participation.

In women older than 25 years, the HPV 16/18 vaccine continues to protect against infections, cytological abnormalities, and lesions associated with HPV 16/18 and CIN1+ irrespective of HPV type, and infection with non-vaccine types HPV 31 and HPV 45 over 7 years of follow-up.

Sharing of data from clinical trials benefits patients by enabling new discoveries, meta-analyses, and confirmation of published results....Many academic clinical trialists...fear that other investigators will gain unfair rewards from their work and that coinvestigators and mentees will no longer have preferred access to data sets in return for working on the trial. But many trials are never published, and many secondary analyses never get done.

We performed a systematic review to assess whether we can quantify the underreporting of adverse events in the published medical literature documenting the results of clinical trials as compared with other nonpublished sources....There is strong evidence that much of the information on adverse events remains unpublished and that the number and range of adverse events is higher in unpublished than in published versions of the same study.

HIV-infected parents in HIV care in Nairobi, Kenya were systematically asked about their children's HIV status and testing history. Conclusions: Referring HIV-infected parents in care to have their children tested revealed many untested children and significantly increased the rate of pediatric testing; prevalence of HIV was high. However, despite increases in pediatric testing, most adults did not complete testing of their children.

Drug companies and academic researchers will have to step up their public reporting of clinical trial results under new federal policies released today. The NIH...also laid out a new plan for submitting clinical trial proposals that aims to beef up the rigor of the studies. Researchers can no longer submit an unsolicited idea, but must respond to a request for applications that will include specific design requirements.

Participants were recruited from 13 provinces in Iran and consisted of 2456 men and 2412 women. Only 37.3% of the participants had a high knowledge score. Most participants...believed that people living with HIV should be supported while only 46.3% were ready to share a table with them....The main source of HIV information was mass media. Among sexually active subjects in this age group, only 26.1% male [and] 7.1% female were consistent condom users.

HIV prevalence among MSM remains high whereas knowledge of seropositive status and suppression of viral load remains low. MSM report a wide range of high risk behaviors, frequent homophobic abuse, poor mental health, as well as low levels of testing and treatment. Better access to tailored prevention and treatment services to improve population-level viral load suppression are warranted.

Traditional approaches to estimate the contribution of sex work to [HIV] epidemics do not capture the potential for upstream and downstream sexual and vertical HIV transmission. Emerging approaches such as the transmission population attributable fraction from dynamic mathematical models can address this gap.

We report the successful nationwide implementation of Couples' Voluntary HIV Counseling and Testing (CVCT) in Rwanda, the first African country to have established CVCT as standard of care....To duplicate Rwanda's success, training and technical assistance must be part of a coordinated effort to set national targets, timelines, indicators and budgets. Governments, bilateral and multilateral funding agencies must jointly prioritize CVCT for prevention of new HIV infections.