Hiv Infection

Baltimore continues to lead major American cities in the percentage of gay men infected with HIV, according to a recently released report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 38 percent of men who have sex with men in Baltimore were infected — twice the overall percentage in the 21 cities studied by the CDC in 2008. More troubling, researchers said, was the number of those who were unaware of their infection. That was nearly three-quarters in Baltimore and rising, compared with about 44 percent nationwide.

It's not that he has trouble expressing himself in words. After all, at the tender age of 20, he's already written an autobiography. But when he tells his story, as he did recently in Baltimore, the young man from Zimbabwe often points to a painting of his that he brought from Africa. It shows a figure standing at an open door, about to step out of a darkened room and into a place showered in brightness. The meaning isn't hard to grasp. The figure depicts the artist himself, the soft-spoken yet confident Tichaona Mudhobhi.

Plans for a large human trial of a vaccine against the AIDS virus in the United States were canceled yesterday because federal health officials said the vaccine was unlikely to prove effective and might increase the risk of HIV infection among volunteers. The decision is another major setback in efforts to develop a vaccine to combat the human immunodeficiency virus, which health officials contend would be their best weapon to control the AIDS pandemic. Several other HIV vaccines are in various stages of human testing in many countries.

Report highlights baby-bottle risk Chemicals Parents who heat plastic baby bottles risk feeding their children a synthetic hormone linked with medical, reproductive and developmental problems, according to a University of Missouri study released last week. The chemical - bisphenol A - is used in making hard, polycarbonate plastic and leaches out of the bottles when heated to 80 degrees or filled with hot liquids, researchers said. Bisphenol A is a synthetic estrogen that can cause feminization in boys, an onset of early puberty in girls, prostate and breast cancer, and some forms of diabetes.

The failure of Merck & Co.'s once-promising AIDS vaccine has cast a pall over research efforts and forced delays in trials of other experimental vaccines as scientists ponder what went wrong. After more than two decades of work, vaccine researchers were hoping to be further along. Even if other vaccine initiatives eventually succeed, the arduous process of development and testing means that there won't be an immunization to prevent HIV for at least another decade, one top federal researcher says.

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,...

Circumcising HIV-infected men to prevent them from spreading the virus to their female partners might have the opposite effect, according to preliminary results of a study in Uganda by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Scientists found that infected men who resumed sexual activity before their circumcision wounds healed were more likely to spread the virus than infected men who didn't have the surgery. "This is a complicated situation ... but it seems that HIV-positive men initiating sex before wound healing is potentially dangerous for transmitting HIV," said Dr. Kevin M. De Cock, head of the World Health Organization's HIV/AIDS department.

Caught in the middle of a fight between urban and rural states, the Baltimore region could lose more than half of its $20 million allotment of federal funds to care for people with HIV infection if Congress fails to reach an accord this year, local officials said yesterday. The prospect of losing the money spurred city officials and AIDS activists to call on lawmakers to avoid leaving thousands of local residents without medical care and lifesaving drugs. "We're facing a crisis that resources won't be available and we'll end up with lines of people waiting for the medications," said Dr. William Blattner, chief epidemiologist at the University of Maryland's Institute of Human Virology and head of a city commission on HIV/AIDS.

In 2005, there were 39 million people worldwide living with HIV, 4 million new HIV infections and just fewer than 3 million deaths because of AIDS. Four years earlier, the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on AIDS committed to substantial steps to reduce infections and provide treatment to people with HIV. Given the prevalence of HIV, as reflected in the statistics, has this commitment made a difference? Yes, but it is not nearly enough. In the past five years, for example, the number of people receiving HIV treatment worldwide has jumped more than 540 percent.

Twenty-five years into the AIDS epidemic and halfway through the initial phase of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, there is increasing international consensus about the need to target women and girls. One area where the U.S. could make a real difference in women's lives has until recently been largely overlooked: integrating HIV/AIDS and reproductive health services. This presents important new opportunities for the U.S. AIDS program to become more effective and sustainable.