5 JUNE VOLUME 16 ISSUE 23

The Minister for Health and Social Welfare, Dr. Seif Rashid, told the National Assembly here that until December 2014, more than 25 million people had tested for HIV/Aids [and]....that his ministry has empowered 109 health clinics that issue ART to HIV+ pregnant mothers....The minister also reported that home-based care services have been increased to 338,547 people..., adding that counselling and testing services will also be increased to reach 7,411,619 people and provide ARVs to 880,681 people living with HIV/AIDS.

A study that looks at the genetic makeup of archived samples of drug-resistant HIV in the UK has found evidence that some drug-resistant strains of HIV are very long-lived and persisting in the population. However they appear to be passed on by people who are undiagnosed or not on ART and are not arising anew in patients on treatment....In contrast, resistance mutations that commonly arise on treatment now...are not being commonly transmitted.

Deborah Birx wants to wring more from the $6.8 billion the US gives her each year to fight AIDS around the world. Hampered by a stagnant budget, she’s cutting off funding to clinics that fail to find HIV cases and looking to Starbucks and Nike for ideas. Birx...has tapped the Nike Foundation to help craft HIV prevention messages for young women [and] sought advice from...the US unit of private-equity firm Apax Partners on organizational change.

The fifth edition of the Medical Eligibility Criteria (MEC) for Contraceptive Use sounds like what you might expect—a compendium of guidelines to assist physicians, nurses and midwives around the world in providing women their preferred method of planning their families. But the June 1, 2015, release of highlights of this updated edition will significantly change the family planning (FP) landscape in developing countries, expanding access to long-acting contraceptives and reducing the unmet FP needs of 225 million women.

The introduction of Craigslist led to an increase in HIV infection cases of 13.5 percent in Florida over a four-year period, according to a new study. The estimated medical costs for those patients will amount to $710 million over the course of their lives, research shows.

A major international clinical trial has provided the strongest evidence yet that people infected with HIV....should get treated as soon as possible, even if they are feeling well, to ward off serious illness and fatal complications in future years. The finding raises the powerful moral question of whether global and national organizations can find the will — and the resources — to protect millions of people from deaths and diseases that could be prevented.

At a secluded research center 25 miles west of Boston, Harvard Medical School scientists have used primates to make key discoveries over the last half-century....They unambiguously showed that nicotine is addictive and did experiments that laid the basis for the ongoing quest to develop an HIV vaccine. At the end of May, the long history of the New England Primate Research Center will come to an abrupt end as Harvard takes the unusual step, one baffling to many researchers, to close the facility.

Gilead Sciences announced that its investigational fixed-dose combination of Emtriva and tenofovir alafenamide has been accepted for review by the European Medicines Agency for treatment of HIV-1 infection in combination with other HIV antiretroviral agents....HIV is one of the primary areas of focus for Gilead....In 2014, HIV product sales accounted for more than 40% of Gilead's total sales. However, competition in the HIV landscape is gradually intensifying.

It is difficult to fathom today the political firestorm that erupted more than 20 years ago when one of us called for sex education for the nation’s youth...” Since then, the United States has made significant strides....Despite these gains, the United States continues to have one of the highest teen birth rates and some of the highest rates of sexually transmitted disease in the industrialized world....Perhaps most distressing is that our national response continues to misunderstand the challenge.

The study highlights a significant barrier to healthcare experienced by persons living with disabilities who became HIV-positive (PWD/HIV+), with important implications for the future design and equitable delivery of HIV services in Zambia. Stigma importantly affects the abilities of PWD/HIV+ to manage their health conditions.

Selection of CAB members from within the community...contributed positively to the conduct of the study and enhanced awareness and acceptance of the research. However, establishment of study specific CABs has the potential to compromise CAB independence due to support provided by the research team in the form of transport reimbursements [etc]. Consideration should be given to establishing community wide CABs that could function across a range of studies to increase independent objective decision-making.

Male partner engagement in either the gender-separate or couples-based interventions led to modest improvements in gender power, adoption of more egalitarian gender norms, and reductions in relationship conflict for females. The aspects of relationship power that improved, however, varied between the couples and gender-separate conditions, highlighting the need for further attention to development of both gender-separate and couples interventions.

Overall the study suggests how internal social and reproductive factors can combine with extraneous pathogens to influence the diversity of major histocompatibility complexes (MHCs) in this wild population of our closest relatives....[T]he sustained presence of genetically and functionally equivalent MHC molecules in both humans and chimps (and quite possibly in gorillas) implies that despite the relatively recent origins of HIV and SIV, hominids may have been battling related lentiviruses for the best part of 10 million years.

Debates about Ebola and WHO's response (and future) certainly overwhelmed discussions in Geneva last week. But the most exciting moment...was [that] for the first time in the history of WHO and its Assembly, a civil-society led forum was held to strengthen political accountability for global health—specifically, for women's and children's health....

Results show that when considering attending an outreach service to access family planning, young people value confidentiality and availability of HIV services, though significant observable and unobservable heterogeneity is present. Young people were able to complete a complex Discrete Choice Experiment and appeared to trade between the different characteristics used to describe the outreach services. These findings may offer important insight to policy makers.