Tag: HIV/AIDS

From Wired.com: With HIV’s 30th anniversary around the corner, a new interactive map reveals U.S. data on the disease down to individual counties and, for some cities, even zip codes.

The nonprofit mapping effort, called AIDSVu, isn’t a perfect representation of the disease in the United States. The visualization is based on 2008 data, some states didn’t contribute county or demographic information that others did, and the map shows only diagnosed rates and cases. An estimated 1 in 5 HIV carriers in the U.S. are undiagnosed.

Despite these limitations, it may be the most thorough geographical depiction of HIV ever created.

“It shows HIV doesn’t respect borders like statistical reports do, and shows how far it’s reached into every part of the country, even rural areas,” said epidemiologist Patrick Sullivan of Emory University, one of the project’s leaders. “You can, for example, see a corridor of infection that goes down through the southeast. This is a new way of looking at this epidemic.”

Laws in every U.S. state require testing centers to report HIV-positive diagnoses, stripped of private information, to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet building a map using this data was a massive undertaking.

AIDSVu leaders spent more than 1.5 years coordinating the data’s entry into a single Google Map. With just a few clicks, it shows county-by-county HIV cases and rates, and the epidemic’s patterns by gender, poverty, ethnicity and other demographics.

New York City and Washington D.C. even show the disease’s reach down to zip codes. For example, in 10036, the zip code from which this story was written, the rate of people diagnosed with HIV is at least 1.95 percent. That’s about three times New York state’s average.

The AIDSVu map will be continually updated as fresh data arrives. The organization hopes states and counties that didn’t provide more detailed data will change their minds, helping create an even more complete picture of the epidemic.

From Belfast Telegraph: An experimental vaccine could prove to be the ultimate weapon against AIDS, research suggests.

Studies indicate it has the potential to clear the body of all traces of the AIDS virus, HIV.

Uniquely, the injected vaccine is carried by a persistent virus which remains in the body for life.

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) enables the immune system to be constantly on the alert for HIV.

Researchers in the US used different versions of the vaccine against a monkey form of the AIDS virus, Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV), with outstanding results.

More than half the rhesus macaques monkies treated responded to the point where even the most sensitive tests detected no signs of SIV.

To date, most of the animals have maintained control over the virus for more than a year, gradually showing no indication they had ever been infected.

Unvaccinated monkeys infected with SIV went on to develop the monkey equivalent of AIDS, caused by the collapse of their immune systems.

The findings suggest the vaccine could be effective enough to rid the body of immunodeficiency virus completely, according to the scientists writing in the journal ‘Nature’.

Conventional antiretroviral therapies are able to control HIV infection, but cannot clear the virus from its hiding places within the immune system’s white blood cells.

Study leader Dr Louis Picker, from Oregon Health & Science University’s Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute, said: “The next step in vaccine development is to test the vaccine candidate in clinical trials in humans.

“For a human vaccine, the CMV vector would be weakened sufficiently so that it does not cause illness, but will still protect against HIV.”

CMV belongs to the herpes family of viruses, and like other members of the group never leaves the body once an infection has occurred.

From Instinct: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gifted the University of Maryland School of Medicine 23.4 million dollars to continue the decades-long work on a promising HIV/AIDS vaccine. The Los Angeles Times reports that the money was awarded to the university’s Institute of Human Virology, headed by Dr. Robert Gallo, who helped discover the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, and who also developed the HIV blood test.

The significance about their work is that the vaccine being researched would neutralize many different strains of HIV. In the past, researchers say, vaccine candidates responded only to single strains or narrow ranges of the disease.

Knowing that the virus mutates has been the greatest challenge for scientists. Though it sounds like deflection is the key to this vaccine, because the IHV vaccine contains a protein that is normally hidden within the AIDS virus, but exposes itself when the virus attaches to a cell before attacking it. Unlike the proteins on the outer coat of the virus, this protein doesn’t change.

To date, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed $2.2 billion in grants to HIV/AIDS research.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History will mark the 30th anniversary of the emergence of what became known as the HIV and AIDS epidemic with a three-part display and website beginning June 3.

“HIV and AIDS Thirty Years Ago” will look at the public health, scientific and political responses in the early phase (1981-87) of the global pandemic. This showcase will be located in the museum’s “Science in American Life” exhibition, which focuses on the connections among science, culture and society in American history. The display will feature photographs, magazine covers and other graphics .

The website will be available at americanhistory.si.edu/hivaids.

In “Archiving the History of an Epidemic: HIV and AIDS, 1985-2009,” the museum’s Archives Center will show how individuals and society were affected by the epidemic through a selection of archival materials from its collections, including posters for the 1993 movie Philadelphia with Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington and the 1989 film Longtime Companion; brochures, photographs and other popular culture materials; and quotes from oral histories of people affected by the epidemic.

The museum will also display a panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt of the Names Project Foundation, honoring Roger Lyon, who died of complications from AIDS in 1984 shortly after testifying before Congress to appeal for funding to combat the growing epidemic.