Free Republic

A popular honeymoon destination is the site of the Pacific’s fastest-growing HIV epidemic, with officials pointing to rising meth use as a key driver. In Fiji, HIV/AIDS cases are projected to double this year to more than 3,000, according to UNAIDS and Fiji’s Ministry of Health. Officials say drug use is fueling the surge across the Pacific island nation. In December, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a rapid assessment detecting unsafe injecting practices.

Federal and local authorities have uncovered what they allege was an illegal biological laboratory operating inside a Las Vegas home owned by a Chinese national. Newly released footage from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department shows a dramatic hazmat response as agents hauled bags of medical tubing, vials and containers filled with unknown liquids from the suburban property. During a press briefing on Monday, LVMPD Sheriff Kevin McMahill revealed investigators discovered a 'significant volume of material' stored in refrigerators and freezers throughout the home, including vials and containers holding liquids of varying colors and compositions. Investigators also located 'pathogen-labeled containers'...

The Pentagon has ordered a pause on training new recruits living with HIV. What’s more, military leadership is considering reinstating a ban that prohibits Americans who are HIV positive from enlisting in the Armed Services altogether, reports CNN. A decision is likely to come down “in the next few weeks.”

Rejects President’s & House Republicans’ Extreme Cuts & Program Eliminations Washington DC… “After a tumultuous year of proposed program cuts and eliminations, Congress has agreed to reject them and instead has maintained funding for domestic HIV prevention and treatment programs on a bipartisan basis. Now, the Trump administration must focus its attention on properly implementing these programs in order to get the nation back on track to end HIV in the U.S.,” said Carl Schmid, executive director of the HIV+Hepatitis Policy Institute. In the final FY2026 spending bill released today by the Appropriations Committees, Congress rejected the House Republicans’ spending...

A couple of years ago, Matthew Hurley got the kind of text people fear. It said: “When was the last time you were STD tested?” Someone Hurley had recently had unprotected sex with had just tested positive for HIV. Hurley went to a clinic and got tested. “Luckily, I had not caught HIV, but it was a wake-up call,” they said. That experience moved Hurley to seek out PrEP, shorthand for preexposure prophylaxis. ... Hurley started PrEP and all was well for the first nine months — until their health insurance changed and they started seeing a new doctor: “When...

"...the New York City Health Department warns that “progress toward ending the HIV epidemic in New York City has slowed at a time when federal funding for HIV testing, treatment and prevention is under significant threat.” ... "...,the health department reports that 1,791 people were newly diagnosed in 2024. This marks a 5.4% increase from 2023. In total, the surveillance data show that 136,034 people report living with HIV. Of those, 68,600 have AIDS. (New York City’s population is nearly 8.5 million.)"

bout two years ago, an HIV outbreak was first identified in Penobscot County, Maine, home of Bangor. In recent weeks, the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed another case, bringing the total of new HIV diagnoses in the cluster to 30. Of note, 29 of those people were coinfected with hepatitis C virus; 29 reported injection drug use within a year of their HIV diagnoses; 27 have been unhoused within a year of diagnoses; 20 were linked to care within 30 days of diagnoses; and 16 of the 27 people currently living in Maine were virally suppressed at...

The United States will need more than 1,500 additional experienced HIV health care providers to meet goals for HIV testing and treatment, according to an analysis presented at IDWeek 2025. The study identified substantial geographic and racial/ethnic disparities, with especially pressing shortages in the South. As HIV treatment has improved, fewer people living with the virus are developing advanced immune suppression and opportunistic illnesses. Modern antiretroviral therapy is highly effective and generally convenient and well tolerated, so some routine HIV care can now be managed by primary care providers. But people aging with HIV have a host of coexisting health...

Treatment Action Group (TAG) is profoundly disappointed and outraged at the lack of health care protections for people living with and affected by HIV, tuberculosis (TB), and hepatitis C (HCV) in the bill to end the U.S. government shutdown. With only a promise of a future vote to extend the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits, millions of people now face unaffordable health insurance costs. As we approach World AIDS Day on December 1, we demand that legislators defend access and affordability of health care, especially for those with preexisting conditions. Several of the fiscal year 2026 appropriations bills, which...

President Trump is rejecting visas for fat people. The Trump administration has ordered visa officers to deny immigrants who are obese or have certain health issues, in yet another instance of the president’s strange obsession with fat people. A Thursday directive from the State Department, sent to embassies and consulates around the world, indicates that people applying for visas to the United States may be rejected if they have certain medical conditions, on the grounds that they could take up domestic health care resources. “You must consider an applicant’s health,” the cable read. “Certain medical conditions—including, but not limited to,...

A study presented at the recent 20th European AIDS Conference (EACS 2025) has found that the apparent rise in sexually transmitted infections (STIs), at least in gay and bisexual men with HIV in France, are due to more frequent testing rather than more infections. Dr Sophie Novelli of the Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (CESP) of the French national scientific health research agency INSERM presented data from 2016 to 2023 taken from the PRIMO cohort. PRIMO is a long-standing cohort, founded in 1996, of people diagnosed with HIV during very early infection. It includes men and women of all...

Just 40 percent of the $110 billion the United States has invested into global HIV/AIDS prevention since 2003 actually went toward on-the-ground deliveries of life-saving medical supplies, with at least two recipients using more than $30 billion in taxpayer money to pay "exorbitant" executive salaries and push "leftwing ideology," a State Department audit found. When the Trump administration unveiled its "America First Global Health Strategy" earlier this month, it contended the nation’s "foreign assistance programs are deeply broken" and often plagued by fraud, mismanagement, and waste. An internal State Department review of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)...

Louisiana is one of 30 states with criminal penalties related to exposing or transmitting HIV. Most of the laws were passed in the 1980s during the emergence of the AIDS epidemic. Since then, several states have amended their laws to make them less punitive or repealed them outright, including Maryland and North Dakota this year. But Louisiana’s law remains among the harshest. The state is one of five that may require people such as Smith to register as a sex offender if convicted, a label that can follow them for over a decade. And state lawmakers considered a bill to...

There will always be three who give us heartburn. Shockingly, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who has become the new John McCain of the Senate regarding being a thorn in the side, opted not to break ranks on the recissions package, which codifies some $9 billion in cuts. The gutting of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio is included in this package, which barely advanced on a key vote to move the bill forward. Vice President JD Vance had to go up to the hill to break the 50-50 tie. Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Susan Collins (R-ME), and...

IRVINE, Calif. — On the morning of Feb. 28, 2000, a man in a black hood ran up to Patrick Riley in front of his office, shot him flush in the face and fled. The bullet missed his brain, and Mr. Riley, a biotechnology entrepreneur, survived. But two days later, his business partner, a doctor named Larry C. Ford, killed himself with a shotgun after learning he was suspected of being the mastermind behind the shooting. That is where the story probably would have ended — a lurid but ultimately local piece of intrigue played out in the sun-splashed Orange...

A recent study published last year in the journal Cell has identified the ancient origins of a genetic mutation that confers resistance to HIV, and how it first appeared in an individual who lived near the Black Sea between 6,700 and 9,000 years ago. Named CCR5 delta 32, the uncommon genetic variant disables a key immune protein used by a large majority of strains of the HIV virus to enter human cells and therefore "locks out" the virus in individuals who carry two copies of the mutation.HIV is a relatively new disease. It was only identified in the last century,...

The Insurrectionists have a tendency to spit in the face of the National Guardsmen/women, and others. These Patriots are told to accept this, it’s just the way life runs. But not in the Trump Administration. IF THEY SPIT, WE WILL HIT, and I promise you they will be hit harder than they have ever been hit before. Such disrespect will not be tolerated!

Finally, some good news this week about lawmakers. The governor of Maryland, Wes Moore, signed into law a bill that decriminalizes HIV. Specifically, the bill repeals an old law that made it a crime to “knowingly transfer or attempt to transfer” HIV to another individual.

On a morning in early April, Geoffrey Chanda's phone was going off almost constantly. Truck drivers were calling him. "They are crying: 'We've got no [HIV] medicine. Where do you get [it] from?' " says Chanda, 54. For 15 years, Chanda has been meeting truckers in dusty parking lots at the border of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo to give them their HIV medications. Now, he says, he doesn't know what to tell them. He's lost his job as a community health worker. The U.S.-funded program he worked for — which supported the mobile clinic where he collected...

The U.S. is still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic with more and more long COVID cases emerging. Bird flu is a growing threat. Measles outbreaks have been occurring. Antibiotic-resistant organisms continue to spread in healthcare settings. So what do you do next if you are in charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is supposed to protect the health of humans in the U.S.? How about lay off the entire staff of the U.S. government’s Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy?