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An immigration activist is questioning the White House decision to give foreign nationals with HIV/AIDS a special waiver to obtain short-term visas to enter the country. At a recent White House press briefing, Press Secretary Dana Perino was asked if President Bush agrees with a call by Senators John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) and Gordon Smith (R-Oregon) for the lifting of a ban on immigration into the U.S. for those who have HIV or AIDS. Perino said the president has directed the Secretary of State to request that the Secretary of Homeland Security initiate a rulemaking to propose a categorical waiver for...

The creation of UNAIDS, the joint United Nations programme on HIV and AIDS, was justified by the proposition that HIV is exceptional. The foundations of exceptionalism were laid when the "rights" arguments of gay men succeeded in making HIV a special case that demanded confidentiality and informed consent and discouraged routine testing and tracing of contacts, contrary to proved experience in public health.1 But exceptionalism grew—to encompass HIV as a disease of poverty, a developmental catastrophe, and an emergency demanding special measures, requiring multisectoral interventions beyond the leadership of the World Health Organization. The exceptionality argument was used to raise...

THE Senate is near to pass ing a massive $50 billion Emergency Plan for HIV/ AIDS Relief - a bill whose priorities are based on myth, just like virtually all anti-AIDS efforts worldwide. The world's top AIDS bureaucrat recently admitted the truth: "It is very unlikely that there will be a heterosexual epidemic" outside Africa, Kevin de Cock, director of the World Health Organization, told London's Independent newspaper. His bosses at the United Nations issued an official denial - but couldn't truly challenge his science.

Diagnoses of H.I.V. and AIDS in men who have sex with men rose significantly between 2001 and 2006 while declining in other demographic groups, the federal Centers for Disease Control reported Thursday. The increase in diagnoses was especially high among males between the ages of 13 and 24, with an annual increase of 12.4 percent, compared to 1.5 percent for men overall. The annual increase was still higher among young African-American men who have sex with men, nearly 15 percent. Among African-American men of all ages who have sex with men, the annual increase in diagnoses was 1.9 percent. Experts...

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA--The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) responsible for most of the AIDS cases in the world infected people approximately 100 years ago, more than 20 years earlier than previously believed, according to findings presented here this week at the Evolution 2008 meeting. Its lesser known cousin, HIV-2, jumped into humans decades later, from a monkey species that carried the virus for just a couple of hundred years, not the millions of years researchers had assumed, according to other research presented at the meeting. Researchers are trying to pin down the origins of both HIVs to understand how often new human...

The number of young homosexual men being newly diagnosed with HIV infection is rising by 12 percent a year, with the steepest upward trend in young black men, according to a new report. The double-digit increase in young gay men is about 10 times higher than in the homosexual community overall, where the number of new infections is going up about 1.5 percent a year. The report, released yesterday by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, appears to confirm impressions that a "second-wave" AIDS epidemic is underway in gay America.

A new analysis of HIV diagnoses among men who have sex with men points to a troubling increase in new cases among young men, U.S. health officials reported Thursday. Public health experts use the term "men who have sex with men," or MSM, because many of these men are not strictly homosexual or even bisexual.

The New York City health department plans to announce on Thursday an ambitious three-year effort to give an H.I.V. test to every adult living in the Bronx, which has a far higher death rate from AIDS than any other borough. The campaign will begin with a push to make the voluntary testing routine in emergency rooms and storefront clinics, where city officials say that cumbersome consent procedures required by state law have deterred doctors from offering the tests. “Routine would mean if you came into the emergency room for asthma or a broken leg, we test everyone for H.I.V., if...

How should society deal with a behavior -– a lifestyle choice -- that places those who engage in the behavior at a high risk for poor health and grave disease? If the behavior in question is smoking, American society does everything in its power to discourage the behavior to the point of passing laws that make it illegal to puff in public places, even if the public venue is privately owned. However, if the behavior that results in probable poor health and potentially fatal disease is promiscuous sex, particularly homosexual sex, society only encourages those who engage in the behavior...

"We must now do better at delivering prevention: less than 20 percent of those at risk of HIV infection are currently receiving such help." --Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Nature, May 15, 2008) World AIDS Day has come and gone. The theme for World AIDS Day 2007 was "leadership." The commentary on the World AIDS Day webpage (http://www.worldaidscampaign.info) noted that this theme can be "as flexible as possible to accommodate a range of campaigning needs." Isn't this type of "flexible" attitude around HIV part of the problem -- and the reason that...

The Aids scare was one of the most distorted, duplicitous and cynical public health panics of the last 30 yearsFinally we have a high-level admission that there is no threat of a global Aids pandemic among heterosexuals. After 25 years of official scaremongering about western societies being ravaged by the disease – with salacious, tombstone-illustrated government propaganda warning people to wear a condom or "die of ignorance" – the head of the World Health Organisation's HIV/Aids department says there is no need for heterosexuals to fret. Kevin de Cock, who has headed the global battle against Aids, said at the...

... But the second charge, concerning prevention, is harder to excuse. It has been known for years that HIV is hard to pass on during normal heterosexual intercourse. Only one copulation in 500-1,000 with an infected individual will do so. The risk comes with certain behaviour (anal intercourse, which risks tearing the lining of the gut; and injecting drugs using dirty needles), certain professions (prostitutes of both sexes) and certain ways of life (multiple, simultaneous lovers, rather than serial polygamy). Aiming propaganda at heterosexual teenagers is (outside the special case of Africa) a waste of money. It is, however, often...

The head of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department has officially admitted for the first time that there will be no global epidemic of the disease among the heterosexual population outside Africa, The Independent reported.Kevin de Cock said global prevention strategies to address AIDS as a risk to all populations, among the WHO and major AIDS organizations, may have been misdirected. It is now recognized that, with the exception of sub-Saharan African, it is confined to high-risk groups.These groups include men who have sex with other men, drug users who inject with needles, and sex workers and their clients,...

Is HIV/AIDS a big lie? (Part 2) Part 1 here. Note: Is HIV/AIDS as its commonly held to be, or is there some conspiracy? I don't know. (There certainly are some strong opinions about it over at Free Republic.) As I stated in Part 1, I am willing to allow the question to be asked and debated herein. This debate does not necessarily represent views held by the staff of Modern Conservative, but for right now, the battle continues between Baker and his correspondent...*******LOL...Miss Farber, this is what you call "evidence"??? Two lame testimonials, one from an unidentified individual and...

...I am not a scientist. I am, however, a career investigator. I will try to address your concerns from an investigative standpoint and hope that our dialogue will satisfy my own curiosity about this subject. Although I am not gay, I have watched many friends die (here’s one of them) from what I once believed was an AIDS-related death. I have also seen thousands of individuals during my career whose behavioral toxicity (i.e. drug use, gay and/or criminal lifestyle) contributed to their degraded health. The correlation between the degradation of health, a suppressed immune system, and the opportunistic properties of...

A number of studies have suggested that climate change could expand the range of tropical diseases like Dengue fever and Encephalitis. Now a researcher from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia says that global warming could lead to an increase in HIV infection rates worldwide. In a panel discussion between top HIV researchers, Professor Daniel Tarantola said that warming could strain already meager health and social resources in the world's poorest and most vulnerable countries, worsening the incidence of HIV and other diseases. "It was clear soon after the emergence of the HIV epidemic that discrimination, gender...

Any hunter will tell you that when your quarry goes into hiding, you have to flush it out to get a good shot at it. Such is the case with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Though antiretroviral "cocktails" can target an active infection, they cannot get at the virus when it retreats inside the host's T cells, where it may lie dormant for decades, waiting for an opportunity to burst forth in a fresh round of infection. What HIV hunters need is a good bird dog. Now, Stanford chemist Paul Wender and his coworkers have found a way to...

The party girl image was nowhere to be seen when Jenna Bush gave the keynote address at the annual banquet held by Wisconsin Women in Government. The 25-year-old daughter of President George W. Bush, who was cited twice for underage drinking during her college days, has undergone a public relations metamorphosis since the publication last year of her bestselling book, "Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope," which is about a single mother living with HIV. On Thursday night at the Monona Terrace Convention Center, Bush, who is expected to wed fiance Henry Hager this May, was gracious and humble in...

Tens of thousands of children have been orphaned by the HIV pandemic The US is set to spend $50bn to battle HIV/Aids in the next five years. The US House of Representatives has passed a bill to more than triple government spending in Africa and other badly-affected parts of the world. The bipartisan measure, which is backed by the White House, was passed by 308 votes to 116. The bill marks a huge increase from the $15bn authorised during the first five years of an initiative launched by President Bush in 2003. "There is a moral imperative to combat...

Some Teens Also Believe Mountain Dew Will Stop PregnancyORLANDO, Fla. -- A recent survey that found some Florida teens believe drinking a cap of bleach will prevent HIV and a shot of Mountain Dew will stop pregnancy has prompted lawmakers to push for an overhaul of sex education in the state. The survey showed that Florida teens also believe that smoking marijuana will prevent a person from getting pregnant. State lawmakers said the myths are spreading because of Florida's abstinence-only sex education, Local 6 reported. They are proposing a bill that would require a more comprehensive approach, the report said....

WASHINGTON — Researchers must go back to the drawing board before they can develop an effective vaccine against H.I.V., AIDS experts said at a scientific meeting on Tuesday. And Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top federal official responsible for AIDS research, agreed that more fundamental knowledge is needed about H.I.V. and the way the body and experimental vaccines respond to it before the goal of a licensed H.I.V. vaccine can be reached. Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pledged to re-evaluate the use of all $1.5 billion his agency spends on AIDS research...

The two-decade search for an AIDS vaccine is in crisis after two field tests of the most promising contender not only did not protect people from the virus but may actually have put them at increased risk of becoming infected, The Washington Post reported. Experts are questioning the overall strategy and scientific premises of the nearly $500 million in AIDS vaccine research funded annually by the government after the two field tests were halted last September and seven other trials of AIDS vaccines have either been stopped or put off indefinitely. The recently closed studies, STEP and Phambili, were halted...

Despite contributing billions to the international battle against AIDS, the United States remains one of only 13 nations — including Iraq, Qatar and Armenia — to ban HIV-positive foreign visitors and immigrants. Public health officials and advocates are calling on the U.S. government to lift the long-standing travel ban for foreigners with HIV, calling it draconian and politically motivated. Congress appears to be listening. The Senate is expected to debate the ban this month as part of President Bush's global AIDS relief package. The U.S. has faced harsh criticism internationally for having one of the most restrictive immigration policies for...

CHICAGO - Startling government research on teenage girls and sexually transmitted diseases sends a blunt message to kids who think they're immune: It's liable to happen to you or someone you know. In the first study of its kind, researchers at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found at least 1 in 4 teenage American girls has a sexually transmitted disease. The most common one, HPV, is a virus that can cause cervical cancer, and the second most common, chlamydia, can cause infertility. Nearly half of the Black teens in the study had at least one sexually transmitted...

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- At least one in four teenage girls nationwide has a sexually transmitted disease, or more than 3 million teens, according to the first study of its kind in this age group. The study by CDC researcher Dr. Sara Forhan is an analysis of nationally representative data on 838 girls who participated in a 2003-04 government health survey. Teens were tested for four infections: human papillomavirus, or HPV, which can cause cervical cancer and affected 18 percent of girls studied; chlamydia, which affected 4 percent; trichomoniasis, 2.5 percent; and herpes simplex virus, 2 percent.

"Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been soliciting high-priced hookers for at least six years and possibly for more than a decade, sources tell The Post.... Sources tell The Post that Spitzer had frequented high-priced hookers as far back as 2002 and possibly earlier."

A cellular protein that helps guide immune cells to the gut has been newly identified as a target of HIV when the virus begins its assault on the body's immune system, according to researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “The identification of this new receptor opens up new avenues of investigation that may help further elucidate the complex mechanisms of the pathogenesis of HIV infection,” says NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., chief of the Institute’s Laboratory of Immunoregulation (LIR) and senior author of the new study....

When nurses from Blood Bank of the Redwoods set up their needles, blood machines and cartons of high-fructose juice at Sonoma State University last week, 94 students, faculty and staff members donated blood. Math professor Rick Luttmann was not one of them. He was ineligible, he said, because of a federal Food and Drug Administration ban on blood donations from men who had had sex with men. A ban that he said amounts to unlawful discrimination. Blood drives are the newest battleground for SSU faculty members who, led by Luttmann, are out to purge organizations on the 8,500-student campus they...

Homosexuality not only leads to the deadly HIV/AIDS virus, it also leads to premature aging, according to the Los Angeles Times on Feb. 5. “I have a population that, having survived this terrible illness, is now getting illnesses of old age 10 or 20 years sooner than normal,” Dr. Ardis Moe, a physician at UCLA’s Center for Clinical AIDS research and Education, said. Meanwhile, on Feb. 8, Matt Forman, outgoing director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, noted, “We cannot deny that HIV is a gay disease.” According to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and prevention,...

LOS ANGELES — The city of Las Vegas has shut down a clinic where up to 40,000 people may have been exposed to hepatitis C and the HIV virus through the reuse of syringes and vials, officials said on Sunday. The clinic at the heart of the scandal, the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada, "was served with an emergency suspension of its business license," city authorities said in a statement. Officials are asking about 40,000 people to be tested for hepatitis B and C and HIV because of unsafe medical practices at the clinic. Health authorities launched an investigation into...

An important antiviral protein, which targets the family of viruses that includes HIV, seems to have evolved twice in nonhuman primates, researchers have found, with one of the versions evolving somewhere between 5 million and 10 million years ago. The results suggest that these viruses played an important role in primate evolution. New World owl monkeys (Aotus ) were previously known to have a protein, called TRIMCyp, that fends off HIV-1 and other members of the lentivirus family. Recently, five research groups have independently reported finding a similar protein in several species of Old World primate1,2,3,4,5. There are sufficient differences...

Old old old news — so old, in fact, that Rolling Stone covered it in February of last year — but thanks to McCain’s Hagee-related jerkiness and the left’s highly nuanced dudgeon about it, everything old is new again. “Say, big A, doesn’t that make this a tu quoque?” Yes and no: Obama buddying up to Wright doesn’t let Maverick off the hook, and it surely doesn’t make His Holiness responsible for everything Wright’s said (although follow the link to Protein Wisdom and judge for yourself which man is closer personally to the ‘monger of his choice), but it does...

Forty thousand Nevadans soon will receive word that they might have been exposed to HIV and hepatitis strains B and C in what a federal health official called the largest notification of its kind in U.S. history.

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) - Catholic diocese officials say a priest accused of sexually abusing minors is HIV positive. After the Reverend Philip Magaldi recently told another priest that he has the disease that causes AIDS, the diocese alerted people who have lodged allegations against him. The diocese in Fort Worth said it also notified parishes where Magaldi served. Church officials say they believe Magaldi has been HIV positive since 2003. He was removed as a priest in 1999 after sexual misconduct allegations arose in Rhode Island and Fort Worth.

Scientists at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology (GIVI) and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have found that therapy can be used to stimulate the production of vital immune cells, called “T- cells,” in adults with HIV infection. HIV disease destroys T-cells, leading to collapse of the immune system and severe infection. The thymus gland, which produces T-cells, gradually loses function over time (a process called “involution”) and becomes mostly inactive during adulthood. Because the thymus gland does not function well in adults, it is difficult for HIV-infected adults to make new T-cells. Thus, therapies that stimulate...

(CNSNews.com) - In a startling admission, the head of a major homosexual activist group said HIV/AIDS is a "gay disease." The comments were made last Friday at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's (NGLTF) national conference in Detroit by Executive Director Matt Foreman. "Folks, with 70 percent of the people in this country living with HIV being gay or bi (sexual), we cannot deny that HIV is a gay disease," Foreman told his audience. "We have to own that and face up to that." Conservative organizations that work on the HIV/AIDS issue say they are shocked. "Foreman's comments are...

Even the best drugs currently available cannot weed out HIV from all of its hiding places within the body, according to a new study of HIV patients in the United States. The discovery seems to confirm doctors' suspicions that once the virus gains a foothold, it can never be fully eradicated from the body. After years of aggressive drug treatment, the virus still hides out in significant reservoirs, particularly in tissues surrounding the gut lining, the researchers report. Cells in these tissues, a part of the immune system called 'gut-associated lymphoid tissue', remain infected with the virus even though the...

FORT WORTH, Texas -- Catholic church officials in Texas say a priest accused of sexually abusing children is HIV positive. The Fort Worth diocese says the Rev. Philip Magaldi recently told another priest that he has the disease that causes AIDS. Church officials say they believe he has been HIV positive since 2003. The diocese says it started alerting people who claim Magaldi assaulted them. Church officials also say they also notified parishes where Magaldi served. Magaldi was removed as a priest in 1999 after sexual misconduct allegations arose in Rhode Island and Fort Worth, Texas.

p>WASHINGTON, February 14, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In a public statement last Friday, Matt Foreman, outgoing Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, rattled the homosexual activist community by joining the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), pro-family organizations and a growing number of homosexual activists willing to admit that homosexual behavior is both extremely high-risk and primarily responsible for the spread of HIV/AIDS in the U.S. Addressing the topic of AIDS, Foreman drastically deviated from the "gay" lobby's party line by admitting, "Internally, when these numbers come out, the 'established' gay community seems to have a...

The AIDS virus can be passed from an infected mother to her baby if she pre-chews the child's food as sometimes occurs in developing countries, U.S. government scientists said on Wednesday. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it had identified three cases -- two in Miami and one in Memphis, Tennessee -- in which a child was infected in this way between 1993 and 2004. The mother was involved in two of the cases and a relative who acted as a caregiver was involved in the third. In developing countries, some mothers pre-chew food for babies. These...

BOSTON--Two prominent researchers have bluntly assessed the depressing state of AIDS vaccine research and have urged the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to correct its course. In back-to-back plenary talks at the 15th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections today, Ronald Desrosiers, director of the New England Primate Research Center in nearby Southborough, said he thought that NIH--the world's largest funder of AIDS vaccine research--had "lost its way," spending too much money on developing and testing products and not enough on basic research. Virologist Neal Nathanson, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania who formerly headed NIH's Office...

A once-promising experiment to see if treating genital herpes with a common drug could dramatically reduce susceptibility to HIV infection has found no protection whatsoever -- a shocking setback for researchers hoping to find a pill that would slow the spread of the AIDS epidemic. Results of the long-awaited study, which included gay men in San Francisco, Seattle, New York and Peru, as well as women in Africa, were released here Monday at the 15th annual Retrovirus conference, the premiere annual scientific meeting of AIDS researchers.

Swiss change safe sex message on HIV By FRANK JORDANS, Associated Press WriterThu Jan 31, 8:10 PM ET Swiss AIDS experts said Thursday that some people with HIV who meet strict conditions and are under treatment can safely have unprotected sex with non-infected partners.The proposal astonished AIDS researchers in Europe and North America who have long argued that safe sex with a condom is the single most effective way of preventing the spread of the disease — apart from abstinence."Not only is (the Swiss proposal) dangerous, it's misleading and it is not considering the implications of the biological facts involved...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - About one-half of one percent of young adults living in homes in the United States are infected with the AIDS virus, around 600,000 people, the National Center for Health Statistics reported on Tuesday. The agency's snapshot of HIV infection in the United States shows the rate continues to be stable and confirms other surveys that show black men are far more likely than other Americans to be infected. The report covers adults aged 18 to 49 and only people living in households -- not prisoners, the homeless or patients in institutions, said Gerry McQuillan, who led the...

FOR A FEW FLEETING moments Monday night--what should have been vivid and affecting moments--television coverage of President Bush's final State of the Union address fastened on the image of a mother and daughter from Moshi, Tanzania. They sat, their faces alive with hope, in the first lady's box seats. Viewers were not told, and no one seemed inclined to tell them, that Tatu Msangi and her daughter Faith quite literally owe their lives to the Bush administration. After Msangi became pregnant, she went to a clinic at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center and learned she was HIV-positive. Five years ago...

AP Medical Writer In the two decades since AIDS began sweeping the globe, it has often been labeled as the biggest threat to international health. But with revised numbers downsizing the pandemic - along with an admission that AIDS peaked in the late 1990s - some AIDS experts are now wondering if it might be wise to shift some of the billions of dollars of AIDS money to basic health problems like clean water, family planning or diarrhea. "If we look at the data objectively, we are spending too much on AIDS," said Dr. Malcolm Potts, an AIDS expert at...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A drug-resistant strain of potentially deadly bacteria has moved beyond the borders of U.S. hospitals and is being transmitted among gay men during sex, researchers said on Monday. They said methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is beginning to appear outside hospitals in San Francisco, Boston, New York and Los Angeles. Sexually active gay men in San Francisco are 13 times more likely to be infected than their heterosexual neighbors, the researchers reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine. "Once this reaches the general population, it will be truly unstoppable," said Binh Diep, a researcher at the...

Iran: AIDS rate doubles in the holy city of Qom Tehran, 11 Jan. (AKI) - In the past year, the incidence of AIDS has doubled in the holy Shia city of Qom, second only to the Iraqi city of Najaf in religious significance. "The great share of the newly infected have contracted the HIV virus, not through using infected syringes, but through unprotected sexual relations," said Amir, Akbari, director of the city's health centre. In the past year the number of those affected by AIDS in Qom has risen from 177 to 324. Forty per cent of those infected are...

OTTAWA, January 10, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Earlier this week, the federal government came under attack after the CBC reported that active homosexual men are barred from being organ donors because of the high risk of disease associated with homosexual activity. The Globe and Mail reported yesterday, however, that transplant groups denied that active homosexual men are barred from donating organs. "Several transplant organisations" told the Globe that the rules that came into effect in December only "formalize" existing procedures that screen organs for disease. Mark Meloche, head of the surgery section at the British Columbia Transplant Society said, "We will...

One of HIV’s strengths — its ability to use human proteins to enter human cells or integrate with host DNA — may prove to be its undoing. Researchers have now identified over 250 of the human proteins that are needed by HIV to help it spread throughout the body, providing a treasure trove of potential HIV drug targets. Antiviral drugs, which typically attack viral proteins, have had a huge impact on the quality and length of life of HIV-positive patients. But HIV mutates rapidly, so these drugs can quickly become outdated. And since HIV only makes 15 different proteins, there...