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Gay bathhouses that once remained in the shadows to stay in business are now seeking attention to keep their doors open. Some are doing aggressive online advertising and community outreach. Others tout their upscale amenities like plush towels and marble baths. A bathhouse in Ohio has even added hotel rooms and a nightclub. […] In the heyday of bathhouses in the late 1970s, there were nearly 200 gay bathhouses in cities across the U.S., but by 1990, the total had dropped to approximately 90, according to Damron, the publisher of an annual gay travel guide. In the last decade, bathhouses,...

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 study released Monday at the conference shows that vulnerable communities in Nigeria fared far worse after legislation was passed criminalizing gay male sex. And in a panel scheduled for Wednesday , researchers were expected to discuss way to help advocates, doctors and patients combat stigma. The past year has seen both unprecedented advances in gay rights - with expanded marriage equality in the U.S. – and even more significant setbacks, with discriminatory laws passed in Nigeria and Uganda and Russia's president Vladimir Putin speaking out against gay rights, said Richard Parker, a professor of sociomedical sciences at the Mailman...

Results of a new study show HIV rates have declined in the US. According to the report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), from 2002 to 2011 there was a 30 percent decline in diagnosis of HIV nationwide. Despite the decrease in diagnosis, challenges still remain. Trends in HIV The study authors looked at trends in HIV during the time period among persons age 13 and older, finding 493,372 persons were diagnosed with HIV in the US. The results came from data that is part of the National HIV Surveillance System of the CDC. The biggest...

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...

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.Activists have pushed for gay men to be able to donate blood for the past several years. In 2010, a government health committee heard testimonies and reviewed the policy, but ultimately recommended keeping the ban and researching alternative policies. Those at the blood drive today will be given the opportunity to sign a petition against the FDA’s policy which will be sent to the White House.

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...

Millions of dollars dumped into questionable foreign health campaignsThe Obama administration will continue bombarding individual nations with “family planning” and health-care messages costing tens of millions for each campaign, despite acknowledging that some of its past efforts largely failed. The administration casts partial blame for these failures on foreign government recipients, some of whom neglected to adequately cooperate with U.S. plans to change cultural beliefs, for example, about contraception and family size. Islamic leaders in nations such as Jordan rebuffed previous persuasive efforts to increase sterilization and other approaches to reducing birth rates. The administration backed off from that tactic,...

•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...