Free Republic

•Men who have sex with other men have been banned from donating blood by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since 1977. •According to the CDC, gay and bisexual men accounted for 63 percent of new HIV infections in 2010. Universities across the country are hosting a National Gay Blood Drive today to encourage the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to change its current policies which prevent gay men from donating blood. According to the FDA’s website, men who have sex with other men (MSM) have an increased risk for HIV, hepatitis B and other types of infections that can...

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...

I’m not sure how a ruling that frees gay men to expose their sex partners to a deadly virus is a gay rights victory, but clearly I’m not keeping pace with the frenzied rush of liberalism through the gates of madness.If gay marriage was marriage equality, what’s this? Viral equality? State Sen. Matt McCoy of Des Moines cut off Nick Rhoades’ ankle bracelet at a gathering in Grinnell. The crowd was cheering. People were crying.“It was totally moving and made all the work worthwhile,” said Terry Lowman, who attended the event. “To me, the drama played like Jesus washing the...

... 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...

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...

Backward step in fight against HIV/AIDS Story Updated: May 25, 2014 The T&TMedical Association wishes to express its disappointment with the decision by The UWI to terminate Prof Brendan Bain for statements he made while delivering expert testimony in a court in Belize. This is clearly a case of shooting the messenger! There is irrefutable evidence that MSMs are at a higher risk of contracting (and spreading) HIV/AIDS. As a matter of fact they were one of the four original groups to be identified as being at risk when HIV first appeared on the scene in 1981 (remember the original...

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...

After a Mississippi doctor revealed last year that she accidentally cured a baby born with HIV, skeptics suggested the tests that initially showed she was infected may have been wrong. However, on Wednesday doctors at an AIDS conference in Boston revealed that the virus has been cleared from a second baby born 9 months ago in Long Beach, Calif. In the U.S. transmission from mother to child can usually be prevented via prenatal drugs, but the mother, who is mentally ill and has advanced AIDS, didn't take the medication she was prescribed. After hearing about the Mississippi baby, the girl's...

But the U.S. government won’t let scientists try out this promising treatment on humans. On a warm summer day in Chicago at the International Cannabinoid Research Conference, hundreds of marijuana researchers were giggling. It wasn’t the groundbreaking research they’d just heard—proving the ability of THC, one of the active ingredients in marijuana, to stave off HIV (or RIV in monkeys)—that did it. Nor was it the author of the study, Dr. Patricia E. Molina, who had them laughing. It was the rogue researcher daring enough to taint the victory with a harsh dose of reality: “What’s next, testing this on...

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – Brows were raised and eyes rolled back when needle exchange programs were first implemented to stop the spread of disease. Giving away free and clean syringes to heroin users seemed preposterous to many. Now it is a common practice and almost universally accepted as a means to prevent the spread of HIV. Could the same happen with free crack pipes? Soon after our story was posted Friday, KPIX 5 received a flurry of phone calls and emails from city officials denouncing the idea to distribute the crack pipes. Mayor Ed Lee was first with a...

This evil character had unprotected sex with many partners without telling them he had HIV; in fact he lied to at least two, claiming to be disease-free.

Kolkata: A group of organisations have launched a campaign against a move by UN Women, a United Nations organisation dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women, to decriminalise pimping, buying sex and brothel-keeping. "Such a move will fuel huge sex-trafficking as those who buy and sell women will get off scot free," Ruchira Gupta of Apne Aap Women Worldwide, an anti-sex trafficking NGO, told reporters here today. More than 1,000 individuals and organisations representing victims and survivors, women and dalits have signed a petition that the NGO would submit to UN Women in Delhi on January 7. The...

... Many health experts hoped that the medication — Truvada, a combination of two antiviral drugs that has been used to treat H.I.V. since 2004 — would be exuberantly embraced by H.I.V.-negative gay men. Instead, Truvada has been slow to catch on as an H.I.V. preventive in the 18 months since the strategy’s approval by the Food and Drug Administration. In some quarters, the idea that healthy gay men should take a medication to prevent infection — an approach called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP — has met with hostility or indifference. “It’s gotten tons of attention at H.I.V. meetings as...

Obama agenda won't tolerate 'preference for heterosexuality' in other countriesHomosexuals, prostitutes, and transgendered people of Central America are about to receive another boost from the Obama administration, which is expanding an HIV program initially launched during the William J. Clinton presidency. But chief among impediments to achieving U.S. policy goals in the region are “conservative gender norms related to sexuality and strong normative preference for heterosexuality,” a revised government planning document says. Organizations that help “Most-at-Risk Populations,” or MARPs, therefore, will be the beneficiaries of this Phase Two initiative, according to the revised Statement of Work detailing the Central America...

Peshawar, Daily 500 kilogram solid waste including infectious injection & drip from different wards came out from lady reading hospital Peshawar. That is all out to roads that spread infection in society but no one takes serious the matter. According to the investigation daily 400 kilogram solid waste of different ward, including emergency, operation theatre and from surgery ward out. That are all goes to the three different sites of the lady reading hospital. Health department installed the incinerator in hospital for the trash of the infectious waste. But the current condition show that incinerator didn’t used since 3 years,...

A coalition of 31 HIV/AIDS organizations is urging the Obama administration to investigate whether some health insurers are trying to discourage HIV-infected patients from enrolling in new policies being sold under the health-care law, a move the groups say could be illegal. The Affordable Care Act prohibits discrimination against people who are sick; insurers can't deny them coverage or charge them more than healthier peers. But in a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius last week, the coalition said it had noticed "a number of disturbing trends" in plans on the insurance exchanges, including plans that...

Data released last week found that 62 percent of American men who self-reported being HIV-positive said they had unprotected anal sex with a male partner in the last 12 months. The Centers for Disease Control report, “HIV Testing and Risk Behaviors Among Gay, Bisexual and Other Men who have Sex with Men,” noted that the population of men having sex with men (MSM) is a small proportion of the US population; however, this group represents the majority of people diagnosed with HIV. The researchers found that some men attempt to decrease their HIV risk by only engaging in unprotected sex...

Researchers announced today that two men they previously believed to be “cured” of HIV are now showing traces of the virus in their blood. Dr. Timothy Henrich, associate professor of infectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, announced the resurgence of the virus at an international conference on AIDS research in Florida Thursday, the Boston Globe reported. He said the fact that these two men were showing signs of HIV means that the virus can lurk in places in the body where it is hard to find. “This suggests that we need to look deeper, or we need...

The Obama administration is shifting $100 million into research efforts aimed at curing HIV, President Obama announced Monday. A new initiative at the National Institutes of Health will be aimed at "advanc[ing] research toward an HIV cure," Obama said at a White House event marking World AIDS Day, which was Sunday. The initiative is aimed at developing "new therapies," he said. "The United States should be at the forefront of the discoveries how to put HIV in long-term remission without requiring lifelong therapies. Or, better yet, eliminate it completely."

The A3/02 strain combines the two most common HIV strains in Guinea-Bissau and develops into AIDS within five years, up to two-and-a-half years faster than either of its parent strains, said Angelica Palm, one of the scientists behind the study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. This type of strain, a recombinant, appears when a person becomes infected by two different strains, allowing DNA to fuse and create a new one.