Aids Virus

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,...

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have designed a gene therapy strategy to treat HIV, the precursor to AIDS, and a pilot study on five patients resistant to current therapies suggests that it may work. "It's very heartening," said one of the patients in the study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "The goal of the trial was safety. I didn't expect to see a benefit." The 44-year-old Pennsylvania man signed on to the experimental study in 2003, when his treatment options were limited and the medicines he was taking were no longer as effective.

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.

Four years after arguing that humans probably got the AIDS virus from butchering chimpanzees for food, the same researchers say they have traced the origin back one step further - to the monkeys that the chimpanzees ate. They believe the simian precursor to the AIDS virus was created in chimps that ate two kinds of monkeys with different but related viruses: red-capped mangabeys and spot-nosed guenons. They made the deduction by sequencing the genes of the simian immunodeficiency viruses in chimpanzees and 30 monkey species and then compiling "family trees" to see which were most closely related.

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.

Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, A Massive Cover-up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, by John Crewdson. Little, Brown. 670 pages. $27.95. Fifteen years ago, Robert Gallo was a star. A researcher at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., he was famed as the discoverer of HTLV-3, the virus that causes AIDS. Gallo was collecting $100,000 a year from the key patent on the test for this virus, and he - and everyone else in the medical world - figured he would win the Nobel Prize.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - In 1999, Nolutando Makhaba, an unemployed mother living in a black township outside Johannesburg, received two pieces of news that changed her life: One, that she was pregnant. Two, that she had HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Doctors warned Makhaba that if she didn't take a vital anti-AIDS drug, she would likely pass on the human immunodeficiency virus to her baby. But the drug was expensive - about $400, a fortune for Makhaba. And the South African government that she depended on for her health care would not help.