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Women & HIV/AIDS

admin — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 07:51:41 +0000

HIV medicines are giving women longer, healthier futures and new strength. While there’s no cure for HIV, the treatments today allow women to live longer and higher quality lives. Making sense of all your treatment options can be hard. By getting the facts, you can decide the best way for you to manage your illness and get the most from these treatments.
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You Have Options

If you test positive for HIV, find a doctor you can trust who treats HIV-positive women. If you need help finding one, call your state AIDS hotline or the CDC National AIDS hotline at 800-CDC-INFO (232-4636). This hotline will either point you to a specific doctor or to resources in your area where you can get health care, like a clinic. Your doctor will talk to you about your health. You also will get a physical exam. If you found out about your positive result over the phone from a counselor at a mail-in testing company, follow up with a doctor to talk about your result.

Just because you are a HIV-positive doesn’t mean that you will need HIV treatment right now. You and your doctor will decide the best time to start treatment. When to start depends on your overall health, the amount of HIV in your blood, how well your immune system is working, and your readiness to stick to treatment. Keep in mind: It is important to see your doctor often — even before you start treatment — to keep you as healthy as possible.

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Canadian Research Links Anti-HIV Treatment To Drop In Diagnoses

admin — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:32:31 +0000

Canadian researchers have become the first in the world to confirm that an anti-HIV treatment has led to a significant decrease in diagnoses of the virus, according to a groundbreaking study released Sunday at the International AIDS Society conference in Vienna.

The United Nations HIV/AIDS program director, Michel Sidibe, told the conference the UN is embracing highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) as the fundamental prevention strategy to fight the pandemic, based on results from the Canadian study.

For every 100 patients using HAART, scientists recorded a three per cent decrease in HIV diagnoses in British Columbia, said Julio Montaner, lead researcher and director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

“Today is a big day for us in B.C. and Canada. I don’t remember the last time a made-in-Canada strategy to address a global epidemic has taken this kind of initiative,” Montaner told Postmedia News.

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Antiretroviral Drugs For HIV/AIDS Treatment

Lucy — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:45:41 +0000

Acquired Immune Deficiency syndrome or AIDS is a collection of symptoms and infections resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus. The late stage of the condition leaves individuals prone to opportunistic infections and tumors. Although treatments for AIDS and HIV exist to slow the virus’s progression, but, there is no known cure. There is currently no vaccine or cure for HIV or AIDS. The only known method of prevention are based on avoiding exposure to the virus or failing that an antiretroviral treatment directly after a highly significant exposure, called post-exposure prophylaxis.

Well current treatment for HIV infection consists of highly active antiretroviral therapy, also known as HAART. HAART allows the stabilization of the patient’s symptoms and viremia, but it neither cures the patient of HIV, nor alleviates the symptoms, and high levels of HIV-1, often HAART resistant, return once treatment is stopped. Moreover, it would take more than the lifetime of an individual to be cleared of HIV infection using HAART. Despite this, many HIV-infected individuals have experienced remarkable improvements in their general health and quality of life, which has led to the plummeting of HIV-associated morbidity and mortality. In the absence of HAART, progression from HIV infection to AIDS occurs at a median of between nine to ten years and the median survival time after developing AIDS is only 9.2 months. HAART is thought to increase survival time by between 4 and 12 years. This average reflects the fact that for some patients and in many clinical cohorts this may be more than fifty percent of patients HAART achieves far less than optimal results. This is due to a variety of reasons such as medication intolerance/side effects, prior ineffective antiretroviral therapy and infection with a drug-resistant strain of HIV.

Novel Drug Compound Kills Multiple HIV Strains

jumper — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 10:00:23 +0000

Vanderbilt University, Brigham Young University, and Ceragenix Pharmaceuticals Report Novel Drug Compound Kills Multiple HIV Strains; Synthetic Small Molecule Acts Through Unique Strain-Independent Virucidal Mechanism Vanderbilt University, Brigham Young University and Ceragenix Pharmaceuticals, Inc. today announced that one of a family of compounds, called Ceragenins (or CSAs) shows potent virucidal activity in in vitro laboratory tests against multiple strains of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS.
CSAs were invented by Dr. Paul D. Savage of Brigham Young University’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and exclusively licensed to Ceragenix. In data previously presented by Dr. Savage and other researchers, CSAs have been shown to have broad spectrum antibacterial activity. Dr. Derya Unutmaz, Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, tested several CSAs in his laboratory for their ability to kill HIV directly.
“We found that CSA-54 potently inhibits HIV infection of primary human CD4+ T cells, the virus’s in vivo targets, and was not toxic to epithelial cells at concentrations significantly higher than those required to kill the virus,” stated Dr. Unutmaz. “In addition, CSA-54 killed a wide range of HIV isolates, and completely blocked genetically engineered HIV that enters the cells independent of the cell surface receptor the virus normally uses. This finding indicates that CSA-54 likely attacks the viral membrane and disrupts the virus from interacting with its target cells, similar to some of the known microbicidal peptides. This is particularly important as a compound that targets the viral membrane is likely to be effective against all strains of the virus, regardless of mutations as the viral membrane remains unchanged.”

“We are encouraged, based on these early in vitro studies, that CSAs may provide a completely unique family of anti-infectives, potentially active against a wide range of viral, fungal, and bacterial targets, including those resistant to current therapies,” stated Steven Porter, CEO of Ceragenix. “Given the potent activity of CSA-54 against all strains of HIV tested, we plan on exploring the use of this compound in both topical and systemic applications for HIV therapy.”