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At the end of 2014 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its sexually transmitted disease surveillance data for the previous year, 2013, showing the rates for primary and secondary syphilis, which is the most infectious stage of syphilis, increased by an alarming 10 percent. “This second year of double-digit increases of syphilis rates is completely unacceptable and also significantly intersects with our HIV epidemic,” says William Smith, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors. “This continues to affect populations already disproportionately impacted by all STDs, including HIV, most notably gay men and other men who have...

An additional $50 million is going toward treatment and medical facilities across the United States to help combat the AIDS virus, President Barack Obama announced Thursday during a Washington event marking World AIDS day. "We are going to win this fight," Obama said. "But the fight's not over, not by a long shot."

Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that gay and bisexual men comprise “the only risk group in the U.S. in which new HIV infections have been increasing since the early 1990s” and make up 53 percent of all new HIV infections in the United States each year, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius did not mention them in a speech she gave about the disease. Sebelius delivered her speech on Wednesday as part of the Obama administration’s commemoration of the first reported incidence of HIV/AIDS some 30 years ago. On June 5, 1981, the CDC...

New York City (CNN) -- I want this article to break your heart. But it deals with a subject that has had a tough time of it in the break-everyone's-heart department.

A new literature review, published by The Lancet, emphasizes the great proportion of HIV/AIDS cases among men who have sex with men (MSM) in sub-Saharan Africa, a fact often ignored in the fight against AIDS in Africa. The study concludes, however, that the solution to the problem lies in greater openness to homosexual practices from the African nations and better access to interventions, a solution that experts from the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) have called "simplistic." The review, principally authored by Dr. Adrian D. Smith of the University of Oxford, calls for greater acceptance of...

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,...

<p>On Monday, a team of researchers led by doctors from the University of California at San Francisco announced that gay men were “many times more likely than others” to acquire a new strain of drug-resistant staphylococcus, a nasty, fast-spreading and potential lethal bacteria known as MRSA USA300. And sure enough, the study, published online in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was quickly picked up by reporters round the world and across the Internet, including a London tabloid which dubbed the disease “the new H.I.V.”</p>

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, on Tuesday said that he is "very willing" to meet with the mother of Ryan White, the Los Angeles Times reports (Mehta, Los Angeles Times, 12/12). The Human Rights Campaign and the AIDS Institute on Tuesday sent a letter to Huckabee asking him to meet with White's mother to discuss comments he made in 1992 about people living with HIV/AIDS. Huckabee -- who made the statements in an Associated Press survey while running for Senate in 1992 -- wrote that in order for the federal government to...

In Swaziland they are called "lishendes" -- multiple concurrent sexual partners -- and they are the driving factor behind the HIV epidemic in southern Africa, said researchers on Monday at the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto. Instead of casual sexual encounters with multiple partners, established partnerships outside of marriage are fueling a generalized epidemic in southern African countries. These partnerships often involve inconsistent condom use and occur in the context of low rates of male circumcision. At the conference in a presentation titled "Prevention Works: What's The Evidence," researchers put forward evidence for various HIV prevention programs aimed at...

RIO de JANEIRO, Brazil, July 25-A Connecticut doctor said today that his patient is the source of the highly publicized, rapidly-progressing, multi-drug-resistant HIV strain that aroused considerable concern when a New York man was infected earlier this year. "However," said Gary Blick, M.D., a private practice physician in Norwalk, Conn., "we want to emphasize that our patient is not rapidly progressing. Nor is that patient's life partner, who is also infected with a similarly highly resistant strain, rapidly progressing." The reason the infected New York City man's immune system suddenly deteriorated in a three-month period might have had more to...