Aids Virus

African-American gay men are more than twice as likely to be infected with the AIDS virus than their white counterparts, but the reasons aren't abundantly clear, federal researchers said yesterday. "Men who have sex with men account for almost half of all people estimated to be living with HIV in the United States, and African-Americans are the most heavily impacted," said Kevin Fenton, director of HIV prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Researchers at a national prevention conference yesterday said they were somewhat perplexed by the disparity.

Scientific advances, increased federal money for research, and Third World countries finally waking up to the fact that AIDS has ravaged their populations is creating optimism for a milestone that could save millions: a vaccine for the deadly AIDS virus.Just two years ago, when President Clinton pledged to Morgan State University graduates that scientists would find a vaccine for AIDS within a decade, there was plenty of cynicism. Today, there is much less."It is possible that the components for a reasonably successful vaccine are almost there, in our hands, but we don't know it yet," said Dr. Robert C. Gallo, co-discoverer of the AIDS virus.

PARIS -- This week, the curtain will rise on a spectacle without precedent in French history: a former prime minister on trial on charges of involuntary manslaughter.It is a day for which Edmond-Luc Henry, 49, and other hemophiliacs in France who carry the AIDS virus have waited for more than a decade.Once the "Wunderkind" of the Socialist Party, Laurent Fabius, 52 -- or someone else in the government that he headed from 1984 to 1986 -- blocked the sale of an AIDS virus detection test manufactured by Abbott Laboratories, an American firm, so that a French competitor wouldn't be shut out of the market.

Scientists have discovered why some people who are infected with the AIDS virus have a rapid downhill course, becoming gravely ill and dying within a few years, while most infected people live for years without major symptoms.The key is a gene that acts like a molecular rheostat, turning up or down the activity of another gene that produces a protein the AIDS virus uses as a doorway to enter cells.A normal variant of the rheostat gene accelerates the onslaught of the AIDS virus in about a fifth of people whose HIV infection progresses rapidly.

TAMPA, Fla. -- Tom Liberti tells a story that puts a new face on the AIDS epidemic.About two years ago, Liberti, chief of the Florida Department of Health's Bureau of HIV and AIDS, attended a community meeting on AIDS in Miami. There, two people stood up -- a 75-year-old man and an 85-year-old woman.Both announced to the mostly older audience that they had the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome. They'd contracted it through sexual activity."From that point on, you could hear a pin drop in the room," Liberti said.

Researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles say they have documented for the first time a case in which an infant infected with the AIDS virus at birth cleared the virus from his body by his first birthday.The child is now a healthy 5 1/2 -year-old kindergarten pupil who is developing normally and shows no evidence of ever having been infected by HIV.The report, published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, confirms what researchers had suspected was possible but had never been proved -- that the human immune rTC system can fend off the AIDS virus.

AFTER ALL the disappointments in the battle against AIDS, it is significant that the latest ray of hope stems from the keen observation and steely persistence of an Australian social worker.In 1989, Jennifer Learmont, who works at the Sydney Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service, noticed that two people had received blood from a donor who carried HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Yet both recipients, as well as the donor, still enjoyed good health. Ms. Learmont began to search out other recipients of the tainted blood -- a task that involved checking thousands of records of donors and recipients.

DETROIT -- Scientists have discovered another awful fact about AIDS: People are extremely contagious in the first 60 days after getting the AIDS virus -- the same period in which they can't possibly know they have it.The practical implication of the findings: If you suspect your partner is having sex with others, you'd better use a condom. Tests can't detect the virus for four to six weeks -- when most of that risky, early phase has passed.A University of Michigan study, being announced today by the university, found that in the first 60 days after being infected, a person could transmit the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, to someone else in as many as a third of his sexual encounters.

Dr. Robert Gallo and a team of scientists at the National Cancer Institute say they have found three chemicals made by the body that block the progress of the AIDS virus, a discovery that could lead to new treatments for the deadly disease.Those chemicals are part of a class of proteins called chemokines, which normally serve as lowly messengers for the body's immune system, said Dr. Gallo, head of the University of Maryland's new Institute of Human Virology. But they become giant-killers when they confront the human immunodeficiency virus, somehow preventing HIV from multiplying.

Flu shots may backfire on people with AIDS, raising the level of the AIDS virus in their blood without protecting them from the flu, a new study has found.Researchers at the University of California's San Francisco Medical Center found that most study participants had three times the normal amount of HIV in their blood for a short time after getting an influenza vaccination.The flu vaccine activates the same immune-system cells that harbor HIV, causing it to multiply as the cells divide, according to the researchers, who presented the study this week at the annual meeting of the American College of Allergy and Immunology in San Francisco.

After 15 years of futile search for a vaccine against the AIDS virus, researchers are reporting the tantalizing discovery of antibodies that can prevent the virus from multiplying in the body and producing severe disease. They do not have a vaccine yet, but they may well have a road map toward the production of one. A team headquartered at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego reports today in the journal Science that they have isolated two so-called broadly neutralizing antibodies that can block the action of many different strains of HIV, the virus responsible for the AIDS pandemic.

AIDS virus could be eliminated in a decade The virus that causes AIDS could theoretically be eliminated in a decade, if all people living in countries with high infection rates are regularly tested and treated, according to a new mathematical model. It is an intriguing solution to end the AIDS epidemic. But it is based on assumptions rather than data and is riddled with logistical problems. The research was published online last week in the medical journal, The Lancet. "It's quite a startling result," said Charlie Gilks, an AIDS treatment expert at the World Health Organization and one of the paper's authors.

African-American gay men are more than twice as likely to be infected with the AIDS virus than their white counterparts, but the reasons aren't abundantly clear, federal researchers said yesterday. "Men who have sex with men account for almost half of all people estimated to be living with HIV in the United States, and African-Americans are the most heavily impacted," said Kevin Fenton, director of HIV prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Researchers at a national prevention conference yesterday said they were somewhat perplexed by the disparity.

The United Nations has radically lowered years of estimates of the number of people worldwide infected by the AIDS virus, revealing that the AIDS pandemic is waning for the first time since HIV was discovered 26 years ago. The revised figures yesterday, which were the result of more sophisticated sampling techniques, indicate that the number of new infections peaked in 1998 and that the number of deaths peaked in 2005. The new analysis shows that the total number of people living with HIV has been gradually increasing - but at a slower rate than in the past.

NEW DELHI -- India has about half as many people infected with the AIDS virus as previously believed, India's government confirmed yesterday. New estimations of the country's infection rate, based on a nationwide house-to-house survey with blood sampling as well as on prenatal blood tests of pregnant women, suggests the country has about 2.47 million people infected with the virus that causes AIDS, a sharp drop from the previous estimate of 5.7 million,...

The rapid growth in global AIDS cases that characterized the first quarter-century of the epidemic is slowing as some regions of the world are showing evidence of bringing it under control, according to a new UNAIDS report issued yesterday. "The epidemic seems to be slowing down," said Dr. Paul De Lay, director of evaluation for UNAIDS, the United Nations program on HIV/AIDS. "The incidence is increasing, but not at the past rate." India, meanwhile, has surged ahead of South Africa to become the country with the most people living with the AIDS virus -- 5.7 million infections compared with South Africa's 5.5 million.

By the time someone tests positive for HIV at a Baltimore health clinic today, he or she may well have passed on the deadly AIDS virus any number of times. More people in Baltimore are now living with HIV or the disease caused by it than a decade ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranked the city fifth in new cases of AIDS, according to 2003 statistics, the most recent available. To stem that steady incline, city public health officials are pursuing a new way to identify the latest infections.

In a sign of both success and failure in combating the nation's AIDS crisis, federal officials said yesterday that for the first time more than 1 million Americans are now living with the HIV/AIDS virus. Drug cocktails that became available a decade ago have helped HIV patients survive longer than ever before. But the number of new infections has stubbornly refused to fall despite years of efforts to prevent new cases and contain the outbreak, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

BARCELONA, Spain - By 2010, 6 percent of all children in Africa will have lost at least one parent to the AIDS virus, United Nations and U.S. government officials said in a report issued at the 14th International AIDS Conference yesterday. The number of orphans, defined as children younger than 15 who lose one or both parents, is expected to rise in Africa from 11 million now to 20 million by 2010, the officials said. Also, HIV will have orphaned 5 million children elsewhere in the world by 2010, according to the report.

BARCELONA, Spain - The vast majority of young gay and bisexual men in the United States who were found to have the AIDS virus in a recent study were unaware of their infection, according to results reported as the 14th International AIDS Conference opened here yesterday. The rates of awareness among minority gay men ages 15 to 29 in the study were staggeringly low. Among those studied, 90 percent of blacks, 70 percent of Hispanics and 60 percent of whites said they did not know they were infected with HIV, the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome.