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SciShow News reports some promising new findings about the worldwide fight against HIV, including insights about how we can make the most of one of our newest weapons against HIV: circumcision.

A new report offers good and bad news about the AIDS epidemic in the United States: The annual diagnosis rate of HIV, the virus that causes the disease, has dropped by one-third in the general population but has climbed among young gay and bisexual males. Significantly fewer heterosexuals, drug users and women were diagnosed each year with HIV, according to the report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, the annual diagnosis rate more than doubled for young gay and bisexual males. The push for safer sex may be falling on deaf ears in a generation too...

The annual rate of diagnosis with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, fell by a third in the United States between 2002 and 2011, researchers reported on Saturday. Fewer people in all U.S. groups tested positive for human immunodeficiency virus except for gay and bisexual men ages 13 to 24 and over 45, they wrote in a special issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "Among men who have sex with men, unprotected risk behaviors in the presence of high prevalence and unsuppressed viral load may continue to drive HIV transmission," the report said. From 2002 to 2011,...

HIV infections are rising among gay men in many parts of the world, the World Health Organization warned Friday, urging all men who have sex with men to take antiretroviral drugs to prevent infection. "We are seeing exploding epidemics," warned Gottfried Hirnschall, who heads WHO's HIV department. Infection rates are rising again among men who have sex with men -- the group at the epicentre of AIDS pandemic when it first emerged 33 years ago, he told reporters in Geneva. While images of skeletal men dying of AIDS in the 1980s pushed the world to act, a younger generation that...

A US girl born with the AIDS virus and in remission for years despite stopping treatment now shows signs that she still harbors HIV – and therefore is not cured. The news is a setback to hopes that very early treatment with powerful HIV drugs might reverse an infection that has seemed permanent once it takes hold. The Mississippi girl is now nearly 4. As recently as March, doctors had said that she seemed free of HIV despite not having been on Aids drugs for about two years. That was a medical first. But on Thursday, doctors said tests last...

... In many jurisdictions, people who know they are H.I.V.-positive are legally required to disclose this status to potential sexual partners, even when they intend to engage in relatively safe and protected sex. Why do our disclosure policies single out this group, and not, for example, people with other incurable, or possibly fatal, infectious diseases? Why do most policies demand transparency between sexual partners in regard to their H.I.V.-status, but not in regard to past behaviors that may have caused a yet undetected H.I.V. infection, such as intravenous drug use or unprotected sex with partners who do not regularly get...

HOUMA, La. (WWL)– A Terrebonne Parish school teacher is behind bars for having sex with a student and exposing them to the AIDS virus. Terrebonne Parish sheriff’s deputies arrested Derrick Nesby, 37, Wednesday at H.L. Bourgeois High School, the school where he teaches. The 37-year-old is accused of having sex with a 16-year-old male student at the school. “We can establish the fact that there was an encounter that happened,” said Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Chief of Detectives Malcolm Wolfe. WLTX – UPDATE: Friday morning, Terrebonne Parish detectives officially charged Nesby with the additional charge of intentional exposure of the AIDS...

Federal health officials recommended two weeks ago that hundreds of thousands of Americans at risk for AIDS take a daily pill that has been shown to prevent infection with the virus that causes it. If broadly followed, the advice could transform AIDS prevention in the United States — from reliance on condoms, which are effective but unpopular with many men, to a regimen that relies on an antiretroviral drug. . . . . . The first is psychological. Doctors and policy makers need to admit that 30 years of the ABC mantra — abstain, be faithful, use condoms — has...

Pretend it’s 1960, and the Food and Drug Administration has just done something startling. It has taken a drug it had previously approved for infertility — brand name Enovid — and approved it for the opposite use: birth control. That pill — soon simply the Pill — triggered the sexual revolution. But not overnight. Doctors at first resisted giving it to unmarried women. Women were shy about carrying evidence that they actually planned to have sex. Feminists like Margaret Sanger and Katharine D. McCormick braved vilification to champion it. Madison Avenue chimed in: Ads featured Andromeda, the princess of Greek...

Federal health officials recommended Wednesday that hundreds of thousands of Americans at risk for AIDS take a daily pill that has been shown to prevent infection with the virus that causes it. If broadly followed, the advice could transform AIDS prevention in the United States — from reliance on condoms, which are effective but unpopular with many men, to a regimen that relies on an antiretroviral drug. It would mean a 50-fold increase in the number of prescriptions for the drug, Truvada — to 500,000 a year from fewer than 10,000. The drug costs $13,000 a year, and most insurers...

Federal health officials recommended Wednesday that hundreds of thousands of Americans at risk for AIDS take a daily pill that has been shown to prevent infection with the virus that causes it. If broadly followed, the advice could transform AIDS prevention in the United States — from reliance on condoms, which are effective but unpopular with many men, to a regimen that relies on an antiretroviral drug. It would mean a 50-fold increase in the number of prescriptions for the drug, Truvada — to 500,000 a year from fewer than 10,000. The drug costs $13,000 a year, and most insurers...

A compound found in soy sauce may be more potent than the current top antiviral therapy in fighting HIV, University of Missouri researchers have found. Seventy times stronger, in fact. The molecule was accidentally discovered by a Japanese soy sauce company in 2001 while trying to enhance the flavor of its product. The soy sauce molecule they isolated, EFdA, turns out to be part of the family of compounds called nucleoside analogues, which are very similar to existing drugs for the treatment of HIV and other viruses. EFdA samples were sent for further testing, which confirmed EFdA's potential usefulness against...

Last year, Magic Johnson found out that he had the virus that causes AIDS in his body... ...hounded by a new wave of rumors that he must be bisexual, fearing the rejection of NBA players and aware that a $2 million lawsuit from a onetime lover that accuses him of giving her HIV was sure to burst public, Johnson last week rescinded his decision to return to the Los Angeles Lakers.... Of all the turmoil that drove Johnson back out of basketball, it is the grievous lawsuit in Michigan filed by a woman called only Jane Doe that threatens most...

Offering a first glimpse of the health care needs of Americans who bought coverage through federal and state marketplaces, an analysis of the first two months of claims data shows the new enrollees are more likely to use expensive specialty drugs to treat conditions like HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C than those with job-based insurance. The sample of claims data—considered a preliminary look at whether new enrollees are sicker-than-average—also found that prescriptions for treating pain, seizures, and depression are also proportionally higher in exchange plans, according to Express Scripts, one of the nation’s largest pharmacy benefit management companies.

Archie fans might want to brace themselves: The beloved character will die this July. Archie Comics announced Tuesday that the lovable redhead Archie Andrews will bite the proverbial dust, to cap the recent “Life With Archie” series. “We’ve been building up to this moment since we launched ‘Life With Archie’ five years ago, and knew that any book that was telling the story of Archie’s life as an adult had to also show his final moment,” said Archie Comics Publisher/Co-CEO Jon Goldwater in a statement. While details of the character’s impending death are scant, it has been revealed that Archie...

It’s the Truvada conundrum: A drug hailed as a lifesaver for many people infected by HIV is at the heart of a rancorous debate among gay men, AIDS activists and health professionals over its potential for protecting uninfected men who engage in gay sex without using condoms. Many doctors and activists see immense promise for such preventive use of Truvada, and are campaigning hard to raise awareness of it as a crucial step toward reducing new HIV infections, which now total about 50,000 a year in the U.S. Recent efforts range from think-tank forums and informational websites to a festive...

To the consternation of African representatives on the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), US and European delegates rejected the idea of including sexual fidelity and abstinence among a list of measures aimed at countering the AIDS epidemic in Africa. US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power defended the move as “part of the United States devotion to protecting the unrestricted right of individuals to have sex with whomever they choose, whenever they choose. To merely suggest that a person might lower their risk of infection by remaining faithful to a sexual partner or deferring sexual gratification...

W. C. Harris is a radical gay activist and Professor of Queer Studies and Early American Literature. He says that homosexuals are still cruelly oppressed in America, even though some of them may end up with very comfortable jobs as university professors.... He is particularly angry with the Christian right for oppressing him.... So he would like to abolish Christianity altogether....and replace it with that he wittily calls “Gaytheism,” i.e., homosexual atheism. Unlike beastly old Christianity, this new religion will meet our spiritual needs with “new forms of community that do not harass and malign gay and lesbian Americans or...

American philanthropist Melinda Gates talked about her Roman Catholic faith and funding contraceptives in the global fight against AIDS, noting that many Catholics disagree with official church doctrine on the contraception issue. "Even though I am Catholic I believe in contraceptives, just like the majority of Catholic women in the United States who report using contraceptives, and I shouldn't let that controversy be the thing that holds us back," Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, shared at the TED 2014 conference in Vancouver on Tuesday, The Vancouver Sun reported. The Catholic Church teaches against the use of...

Small advancements make big waves in the decades-long search for an HIV vaccine, and University of Miami researchers are optimistic that their latest findings are significant: They have developed a vaccine that triggers an immune system response strong enough to kill a model AIDS virus in mice. The vaccine is still in the early stages of development, said Geoffrey W. Stone, a UM assistant professor of microbiology and immunology who led the research study published in February’s Journal of Virology. “But in those modest beginnings,” he