25 September 2015 VOLUME 16 ISSUE 39

Otilia Makanganise of Tsumele village in Mwenezi district had been finding it difficult to fend for her family... Otilia and her husband — who have four children — are both HIV positive and require a nutritious diet to augment the life-saving antiretroviral drugs they are taking... “But thanks to the dam project, ...our lives have changed for the better,” she said. The Tsvimborume weir dam and garden project were introduced by the World Food Programme in conjunction with the Japanese government.

"We've let these populations of color down by not targeting disparities," says Austin PrEP Access Project Exec­u­tive Director Ben Walker. African-Amer­i­cans...made up 21.9 percent of Travis County's HIV-positive residents in 2012, despite only making up 8.9 percent of its overall population.... Walker says his clinic sees people who ask their doctors about using PrEP against HIV, but are told they need to use condoms instead...."We have a culture that doesn't want to talk about sex," explains Walker.

Community activism has played a crucial role in achieving better access to HIV treatment. Although there is comparatively better access to treatment now,...there is a need for community activists to monitor service provision [as] national governments increasingly take responsibility for delivery of HIV services. We need to repoliticize the AIDS movement to counter the complacency and bureaucratization of community engagement.

Scripps Florida scientists have been awarded nearly $6 million dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a revolutionary HIV/AIDS alternative vaccine that has demonstrated potential in animal testing,...the first grant awarded by the Gates Foundation to a Scripps Florida scientist. "This grant is helping us take technology we've developed to human clinical trials," said Michael Farzan, who leads a Scripps laboratory of 12 researchers.

The city of Dearborn, Mich., has agreed to pay $40,000 to a Michigan woman who was ticketed by a police officer because she had HIV. Shalandra Jones of Detroit had sued the city of Dearborn in January 2014 after police Officer David Lacey berated her for not telling him earlier in a traffic stop that she had HIV. He expressed concern about contracting a disease, according to a video of the 2012 traffic stop.

French researchers have developed a vaginal ring made from silicone that could deliver preventive treatments for both HIV and herpes...at a lower cost than other rings. The ring in this study, performed by scientists at University Jean Monnet in Saint-Etienne, France, released acyclovir for herpes at between 1.5 and 3.5 mg per day, and the HIV drug tenofovir for 50 days at a time, according to a report from the American Society for Microbiology.

In March of this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it would be awarding more than $185 million to prevent HIV among men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender people, particularly African Americans and Latinos. This month, the CDC announced the 17 organizations that will receive the funding.

Some heavy-hitting HIV activists have signed on to Janssen's ongoing "Wisdom" campaign, headlining a share-your-story campaign for people living with the disease. The Johnson & Johnson unit will award up to $20,000 in charitable donations as part of the effort, which ties in the company's latest HIV brand, Prezcobix.

Reverend Phumzile Mabuzela, Executive Director of International Network of Religious Leaders Living with or Personally Affected by HIV and AIDS, has called on churches to integrate sexual education into the Sunday school curricula. She said the Church has failed in empowering leadership to respond to real issues like rape and it is imperative for the missions to educate and be educated on social justice issues from a faith or spiritual perspective....Rev Mabuzela said the church had struggled to find positive terminology to discuss sexuality and sex.

An ART regimen consisting of once-daily Stribild may be safer and more effective in women with HIV-1 infection than the standard multidrug combination treatment, according to a study presented here at ICAAC 2015. This is the first ART study to exclusively enroll women, and its results contrasted with those of a previous study of the drug which enrolled mostly men, according to Sally Hodder, MD, director of the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute....A total of 575 participants from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America were enrolled in the study.

A new pill designed to block HIV infections is being described as a "game changer" by some of the 450 gay men taking part in the Australian trials of the drug....Two PrEP trials are underway in Sydney and Brisbane. Dr Mark Bloch is supervising the Sydney trial which will run over two-and-a-half years and involves 300 men at risk of contracting HIV. "So far there has not been one transmission of HIV. It's still early days but that's very encouraging," he said.

In February 1990, 19-year-old Anne Pilon walked into the AIDS Committee of Ottawa's office for the first time. "It was a really scary time. But at the same time, amazing," said Pilon....Pilon's story is just one of many that appear in a new book called A-C-O-X-X-X: Our Words, Our Stories, Our Lives, published to commemorate the committee's 30th anniversary. In the book, Pilon remembers how she was the first HIV-positive heterosexual woman to use the centre, which in the early 1990s was mostly run by gay men, for gay men.

The statement, posted on a State Department website, says sexual rights include people’s “right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination, and violence.” The announcement comes days before more than 150 world leaders gather at the U.N. to launch an ambitious set of development goals, including one of gender equality.

A new study sponsored by Trojan condoms has found that Floridians are pretty bad at sex — the safe kind, that is. According to the State by State Safer Sex Index, Florida ranks 47th in the nation for its high rates of sexually transmitted diseases and lack of contraception education. Actually, much of the southeast United States ranks lowest on the study's list.

HIV latency depends on the activity of proteins from the human host called histone deacetylases, and previous work has shown that HDAC inhibitors can disrupt HIV latency. A study published on September 17th in PLOS Pathogens reports results from a clinical trial of an HDAC inhibitor that had shown potential in preclinical studies and answers open questions about the potential use of these drugs in strategies to eliminate HIV from the body.

The annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) is... usually a cornucopia of clinical and basic research in infectious diseases and anti-infective therapy. This year's ICAAC is no exception and might even be slight broader, since it is a joint affair, including the International Society of Chemotherapy's International Congress of Chemotherapy and Infection (ICC).

A new Sex Work Law Map, developed by the Institute of Development Studies, has been launched that provides a global perspective on female sex work by displaying a detailed summary of the laws, regulations and policies in over 75 countries... The interactive map reveals trends and information that will benefit sexuality activists, human rights defenders, those with an interest in sustainable development and public health, journalists, legal practitioners, policy analysts and academics.

Primary and secondary cases reported during 2009–2010 from 4 US sites were crossmatched with local HIV surveillance registries to identify syphilis case-persons infected with HIV before or shortly after the syphilis diagnosis. We identified 1675 cases of incident primary or secondary syphilis among persons with HIV. More than half of syphilis case-persons identified with HIV had a detectable viral load collected within 6 months of the syphilis diagnosis. This suggests virologic and active behavioral risk for transmitting HIV.

Positive Charge (PC) is a linkage to HIV care initiative implemented by AIDS United with sites in New York, Chicago, Louisiana, North Carolina, and the San Francisco/Bay Area. The study found that PC’s five unique evidence-based linkage to care programs have relatively low costs per client served and highly achievable cost-saving and cost-effectiveness thresholds [and] have the potential to be a highly productive use of public health resources.

Jan-Walter De Neve and colleagues provide compelling evidence of a causal relation between secondary education and HIV incidence... [They]... conclude that secondary schooling is similarly cost effective for HIV prevention as pre-exposure prophylaxis, but more expensive than male circumcision. However, they also highlight that this estimate excludes other benefits of schooling.

Data from the VOICE study showing greater HIV-1 acquisition among women who use depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA) than injectable norethisterone (NET-EN) contraception elicited comment suggesting that use of DMPA be limited. The fundamental uncertainty, not addressed by the VOICE data or recent meta-analyses of other observational data..., is whether DMPA increases susceptibility to HIV, or whether women at increased risk of HIV are more likely to use DMPA.

Of all the uncircumcised participants (n=1,790), 55.2 percent were willing to accept MC; 67.3 percent thought MC could improve their sexual partners’ hygiene and 46.3 percent believed HIV and sexually transmitted diseases could be partially prevented by MC. MC’s acceptability was associated with three factors: the redundant foreskin, knowing the hazard of having a redundant foreskin, and enhancing sexual pleasure. Implementation of an MC programme among this population is feasible.

In a new study in PLOS Biology, José Cueva and colleagues measured the mutation rate of HIV-1...in patient´s cells. They show that the HIV-1 mutation rate is far higher than previously thought, due mainly to the efforts of a cellular enzyme. The high rate of mutation caused by the enzyme may protect the host from virulence but may also promote evolution of HIV to escape that protection. More work in larger numbers of patients will be needed to confirm these results, but the implications are important for understanding, and treating, HIV infection.

This study supports the safety and acceptability of ShangRing male circumcision during 2–3 years of follow-up. It should allay worries that the ShangRing procedure could lead to delayed complications later than the observation period of most clinical studies.

This special issue acts to reassert a long-standing political economy approach to HIV, and adapt it to reflect new competing theoretical approaches and new policy initiatives. However, there are many challenges to anyone constructing an alternative analytical approach to HIV....[T]his special issue aims...to connect the current debates about HIV/AIDS to larger discussions about globalisation, class differentiation, inequity and uneven development in African countries.

PLGA nanoparticles with encapsulated rilpivirine...offered significant protection to BLT humanized mice from a vaginal high-dose HIV-1 challenge. A different nanosuspension of crystalline rilpivirine administered intramuscularly protected BLT mice from a single vaginal high-dose HIV-1 challenge....Together, our results demonstrate that topically- or systemically administered rilpivirine offers significant coitus-dependent or coitus-independent protection from HIV infection.