Thursday, March 08, 2007

Teachers want to know which students have AIDS

Surrey teachers' controversial resolution one of several to be debated at union annual meeting
Janet Steffenhagen, with files from Darah Hansen, Vancouver Sun

Teachers in Surrey, B.C.'s largest school district, want laws changed to ensure classroom teachers are informed when any of their students has HIV, AIDS, hepatitis or other diseases that can be transmitted through blood or body fluids.

The Surrey teachers say it's a matter of safety and later this month they will ask the B.C. Teachers' Federation to back their position and lobby the provincial government for action.

The resolution is one of several controversial proposals to be debated by hundreds of teachers from around the province when they gather in Vancouver for the union's annual meeting, starting March 18.

"Young children often cut themselves using scissors or pins, bite or scratch each other, or throw up," the Surrey Teachers' Association says in written comments supporting the resolution.

"Diseases such as hepatitis and HIV-AIDs are becoming more common and we as teachers need to be informed enough to protect ourselves and our students."

Surrey president John Wadge said his members were sufficiently concerned about the issue that they voted to send it to the general meeting for debate.

But he said the BCTF will have to balance safety concerns with student privacy rights.

"I think the right-to-privacy issues are very valid and may win the day," he said in an interview Tuesday.

Paul Lewand, chairman of the BC Persons with AIDS Society, said a child's HIV status should remain a private matter between the child's family and the family's physicians. The virus still carries a huge social stigma, and could put the child at risk of serious discrimination, he said.

"School is a tough enough time to get through if you can blend in, and if that ability to blend in is taken away it will be hell [for the student]," he said. "It would change their whole school experience and would be something that could never be taken back."

Lewand said his organization could think of no case where HIV has been transmitted in a school, prompting members to question why the discussion has cropped up. "Someone is pushing a personal, private agenda that has nothing to do with the welfare of the children or the school system," he said.

(...)
Click here to read the article

International Women's Day: some resources on women and HIV

Sexual and reproductive health of women living with HIV/AIDS : Guidelines on care, treatment and support for women living with HIV/AIDS and their children in resource-constrained settings
J 220 SEX 2006
Available online! Click here to access the resource.
"The sexual and reproductive health of women living with HIV/AIDS is fundamental to their well-being and that of their partners and children. This publication addresses the specific sexual and reproductive health needs of women living with HIV/AIDS and contains recommendations for counselling, antiretroviral therapy, care and other interventions. Improving women's sexual and reproductive health, treating HIV infections and preventing new ones are important factors in reducing poverty and promoting the social and economic development of communities and countries. Sexual and reproductive health services are uniquely positioned to address each of these factors."

A woman's story : overcoming the shame of HIV
Homewood, Kingdom Publishing, 2005
Call numer: J 210 BYT 2005 ((Click on call number to borrow this book!)
"HIV/AIDS is on the increase among Black women, yet there is a silence that speaks volumes in the community, the nation and the church about this epidemic. Have we forsaken our mothers, daughters and sisters in order to hide the shame of our own lack of involvement? What price will we pay for our detachment from the most indiscriminate health crisis of our time? Perhaps there is hope, if we begin to look at HIV/AIDS through the eyes of those who have been there."

HIV, pregnancy and women's health
London, HIV i-Base, 2005
Available online! Click here to access the resource.
"This booklet aims to help you get the most out of your own HIV treatment and care if you are considering pregnancy or during your pregnancy."



DVD
In women's hands : A film on women, HIV, and hope
Washington, D.C., Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), 2005
Call number: VJ 210 INW 2005 ((Click on call number to borrow this DVD!)
"Kimberly was 21 and in college in the U.S. Little did she know that her boyfriend was HIV positive. After donating blood she learned that her decision to not use a condom with him one night would change her life forever.
Just across the ocean in the U.K., a similar decision would leave 18 year-old Hyshana with an STI – a reality that many adolescents now face.
In South Africa, Virginia lives in rural Kwazulu Natal with her two children, and waits for her husband for months at a time to return from his job hundreds of miles away. When he returns, she can’t possibly ask him to use a condom. He is her husband after all.
These stories, more powerfully articulate the potential role of microbicides and the importance of public and private sector leadership as well as citizen involvement in this issue. It was this demand and these personal stories that inspired the Global Campaign for Microbicides to produce short film on the need for microbicides.
In Women’s Hands will be an important tool for creating discussion and awareness around the HIV/STI epidemic among women, how microbicides could make a difference and the importance of advocacy for microbicides." (from website)

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Circumcised partner may boost women's HIV risk

Source: Canada.com

MARIA CHENG, Associated Press
Published: Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Circumcision may reduce men's chances of contracting HIV by up to 60 percent — but early results suggest the procedure may put women at increased risk of infection, according to preliminary data presented Tuesday.

Early results announced at a U.N. consultation in Switzerland on the potential impact of male circumcision on AIDS in Africa suggested that if HIV-positive men do not abstain from sex while healing from circumcision surgery, their female partners might have a higher chance of catching HIV from them.

However, experts said the results were not conclusive — and highly susceptible to other factors, such as condom use — demonstrating the difficulties of utilizing circumcision in HIV prevention in sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 60 percent of those with AIDS are women.

Previous studies have confirmed the dramatic impact circumcision has in cutting men's HIV infection rates, but a big question has been the resulting effect on women.

The first evidence — though very preliminary — suggests there is a period immediately following surgery when men may more easily transmit the virus to their female partners.

"Women are already so vulnerable in this epidemic," said Jennifer Kates, an AIDS expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation who is not connected to the study. "We need to be particularly careful about anything that could put them at even greater risk."

Click here to read the article

Safe injection site breaks treaties, UN agency says

Source: Vancouver Sun

Federal health minister will be urged to shut down initiatives
Steven Edwards, with files from Darah Hansen, CanWest News Service; with files from Vancouver Sun
Published: Friday, March 02, 2007

UNITED NATIONS -- The United Nations drug control agency is expected to warn Health Minister Tony Clement at a conference later this month that Canada is flouting international drug control treaties by enabling illicit drug use at a supervised injection site in Vancouver.

Clement will be urged to shut down the initiative, which the agency says effectively condones the use of drugs that Canada has agreed in an international forum are banned substances outside prescription.

"In a way, [Canada] is encouraging illicit trafficking," Zhu Li-Qin, chief of the Convention Evaluation Section of the UN's International Narcotics Control Board, said in an interview from the agency's headquarters in Vienna, Austria.

"Traffickers are searching for markets, and a [supervised site] serves as a small market where people go and legally inject drugs."

Officials will notify Clement of the board's findings through established contacts at Health Canada and directly to a Canadian delegation at the annual meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna March 12-16.

Article Four of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs says countries will pass laws to make sure drugs are used only for medical and scientific purposes.

"Generally, in international law, when you sign a treaty, you are supposed to conform both your domestic legislation and your domestic behaviour to the obligations you have under the treaty," said Melvyn Levitsky, a retired U.S. ambassador on the board.

"Although we understand the compulsion behind these sites, the convention says drugs are supposed to be used for medical or scientific purposes -- not for getting public nuisances off the streets."

Other countries facing board criticism for operating supervised injection sites are Australia, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Switzerland.

"The board regrets that no measures have been taken to terminate the operation of such facilities in the countries concerned," says the report.

The board noted in its 2003 report that the Canadian government, then under the Liberals, had approved the establishment of the Vancouver facility, called Insite, and billed as a "safe, health-focused place where people can go to inject drugs."

Click here to read the article.

See also : UN report unwittingly makes the case for prescribing drugs to addicts, Vancouver Sun, published March 3

and Safe injection site illegal, says UN, Today's family news, March 7

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

AIDS: New trial shows needs for caution in adopting circumcision strategy

Source: Yahoo news

Early data from a trial in Uganda shows that policymakers must be prudent when including circumcision among their tactics for fighting AIDS, researchers said on Tuesday.

Last year, three groundbreaking studies conducted in Africa found that male circumcision halved a man's risk of being infected by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

That discovery ignited hopes that the flagging quarter-century-old war against AIDS in Africa could be transformed by a simple, low-cost operation.

The new trial, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, explores a different angle of the circumcision story -- to see whether men who are infected with HIV and are circumcised are any less likely to infect their female partner.

US and Ugandan researchers are following 997 HIV-infected men in Rakai, Uganda. Some of them have been given circumcision, while the others have remained uncircumcised to act as a comparison.

A proportion of volunteers in both groups had uninfected long-term female partners at the start of the study. These women were also enrolled and monitored.

A review at the study's six-month mark looked at 70 couples in the "circumcised" group and found that 11 of the women had become infected. Among 54 couples in the "uncircumcised" group, four women had become infected.

The study is still underway and the data is not considered conclusive.

But the researchers said they were concerned, as several of the infections had been transmitted by men who had had sex before their wounds had fully healed from the circumcision surgery.

The AIDS virus can be carried in the blood, as well as in semen.

This means that, before circumcision can be universally endorsed as a prevention strategy, men and women have to be fully aware about the need to refrain from intercourse for a month or so while the penile wound has healed, the researchers said.

Both partners must be fully versed in safe-sex awareness, especially in condom use.
(...)

Click here to read the article.

New books in the library!

The February list of new acquisitions is now available!
New books and reports, journal articles and educational videos are listed by subject. Links to online publications are also provided.

Print copies are available in the library. If you want to receive the list by email, it's easy! Just call us at 604-893-2248 or send us an email. You can also subscribe and receive the list every month.

UBC researcher finds new way to treat devastating fungal infections

Source UBC

VANCOUVER, CANADA -- Devastating blood-borne fungal infections that can be lethal for HIV/AIDS, cancer, and organ transplant patients may be treated more successfully, thanks to a new drug delivery method developed by researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Pharmaceutical Sciences Prof. Kishor M. Wasan has created a liquid preparation that incorporates drug molecules in fat (lipid-based formulation) so that Amphotericin B, a potent anti-fungal agent, can be taken by mouth with minimal side effects. The agent, used for about 50 years, is currently administered intravenously and has significant toxic side effects, notably severe kidney toxicity as well as serious tissue damage at the intravenous injection site.

Wasan and his research team have discovered that the oral preparation triggers a different molecular interaction than intravenous delivery. The lipid-based system attacks fungal cells only while inhibiting the drug’s interaction with kidney cells – boosting effectiveness and dramatically reducing toxicity.
(...)

Click here to read the media release.

Natural HIV barrier snares AIDS virus

Source: WebMD

Protein in Specialized Skin Cells Traps and Destroys HIV
By Daniel J. DeNoon
WebMD Medical NewsReviewed by Louise Chang, MDMarch 5, 2007 -- A natural barrier to HIV snares and destroys the AIDS virus, Dutch researchers report.

The newly discovered barrier is a powerful first line of defense against HIV infection. But at least one new strategy for preventing HIV transmission may breach this barrier, inadvertently opening the door to infection.

HIV targets T cells, a type of immune cell. It gets to T cells via a type of skin cell called a dendritic cell. Dendritic cells are supposed to warn T cells about foreign invaders. But HIV subverts this line of communication and uses dendritic cells to carry an infectious virus to the T cells.

That doesn't happen if HIV first encounters a specialized kind of dendritic cell called a Langerhans cell. It's hard for HIV to infect Langerhans cells -- and now scientists know why. It's because the cells carry a special molecule, dubbed Langerin.

Langerin grabs HIV and throws it in a kind of garbage disposal within the Langerhans cell, find Lot de Witte of Vrije University, Amsterdam, and colleagues. When the researchers disabled the Langerin molecule, HIV easily infected Langerhans cells.

"Thus Langerin is a natural barrier to HIV infection," de Witte and colleagues conclude.

HIV Prevention Method Has Flaw
As the AIDS epidemic rages on, researchers are looking for ways to prevent HIV infection. One powerful method would be a vaginal microbicide -- an easy-to-apply gel that would block HIV and protect women from being infected by their sex partners.

Because dendritic cells carry HIV to T cells, one promising vaginal-gel ingredient is a molecule called mannan. Mannan breaks the tether that dendritic cells use to haul HIV across mucous membranes.

But de Witte and colleagues find that mannan also disables Langerin, breaching this natural barrier to HIV.

"Inhibitors such as mannan have an unwanted and completely counteractive effect on Langerhans cells -- namely, they negate the protective function of Langerhans cells and enable [HIV] transmission by dendritic cells," they warn.

Instead, the researchers suggest using another molecule that keeps dendritic cells from latching on to HIV without affecting Langerhans cells.

De Witte and colleagues report their findings in the advance online issue of the journal Nature Medicine.

HIV transmission risk highest early in infection-study

Source: Reuters

WASHINGTON, March 5 (Reuters)
People may be most likely to transmit the AIDS virus when they are first infected -- before they start showing symptoms and even before many screening tests detect the virus, Canadian researchers reported on Monday.

This may help explain why the HIV epidemic moves so quickly, they report in the Journal of Infectious Diseases*.

Their genetic analysis of HIV-infected patients in Quebec showed that nearly half of all transmissions occurred when patients were in the early stages of the disease.

"The early infection stage can be entirely asymptomatic," said Dr. Mark Wainberg, of the McGill AIDS Center in Montreal, who led the study.

"This is why people who are recently infected may not know it, and will probably often test negative by conventional antibody screening," Wainberg said in a statement.

Early on, the body has not yet mounted an immune defense against the virus. It does not produce many antibodies -- which is what most quick screening tests look for.

"Hence, we must do a much better job of identifying recently infected people if we are to be able to counsel them to modify high-risk sexual behavior and desist from transmitting the virus," Wainberg added.

Wainberg and colleagues from several hospitals and health clinics in Canada studied HIV transmission through phylogenetic analysis, which is a way to draw the family tree of the virus.

Viruses mutate when they live inside a person's body, and the mutations can be steadily clocked to estimate the first date of infection.

The study found that 49 percent of early infections appeared to cluster in a way that would suggest that most new infections were transmitted by people who themselves were in the early stages of infection, before the virus had time to mutate much.

This is in part because people have many copies of the virus in their blood when they first become infected. The more virus there is -- a measure called viral load -- the more people are likely to infect someone else.

The AIDS virus infects 39 million people globally and has killed more than 25 million since it was first identified in the early 1980s. There is no cure, although drug treatment can keep symptoms at a minimum and extend life.

* High Rates of Forward Transmission Events after Acute/Early HIV-1 Infection, The Journal of Infectious diseases, 1 April 2007, Volume 195, Number 7. Free access!

Monday, March 05, 2007

New HIV/AIDS Resource Center for Women at The Body

The Body, one of the most comprehensive online sources of information on HIV/AIDs recently launched a new website: the HIV/AIDS Resource Center for Women.

As stated in the overview, "After more than 25 years and 25 million deaths, the world has yet to realize that HIV isn’t just a man’s problem. Although it has escaped the notice of most media -- and even many in the health care and health policy fields -- HIV has quietly become the third most-deadly disease for women in the United States, behind only cancer and heart disease. It’s also the leading cause of death for African-American women between the ages of 25 and 34."

In Canada, "Women account for a growing proportion of positive HIV tests reports with known age and gender among adults in Canada. The proportion of females each year has risen, from 12.0% in the years between 1985 and 1997 to 24.9% of adult positive HIV test reports between 1999 and 2002. In 2005, this proportion again increased, though only slightly to 25.4%." (Public Health Agency of Canada, EPI update 2006).

The HIV/AIDS Resource Center for Women offers basic information on HIV/AIDS for women, personal stories of women, interviews with experts, news and links to other resources.