Hiv

Mexican HIV center getting Md. help Maryland's Institute of Human Virology has agreed to help a Mexican university create an institute for the study and treatment of HIV/AIDS. The new center will be a division of the Universidad Autonoma of Nuevo Leon in Monterrey, Mexico. Part of a larger medical science building to be completed in 2006, it will carry the name IHV Mexico but will be independent of the Baltimore facility. Officials with the Mexican university signed a memorandum of understanding in Monterrey yesterday with Dr. Robert Gallo, director of the IHV, and Dr. Jennie Hunter-Cevera, president of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute.

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.

Allowing testimony about a Carroll County man's HIV-positive status during his child sex abuse trial could prejudice jurors against him, defense attorneys argued during a motions hearing yesterday in Circuit Court.In addition, lengthy medical testimony about the human immunodeficiency virus and how it causes AIDS could detract from telling what happened to a 3-year-old county boy, county public defender Barbara Kreinar told Judge Raymond E. Beck Sr. yesterday."If we leave that in, it is not a trial focusing on [the boy's]

GENEVA -- Scientists have for the first time found that strains of the AIDS virus resistant to protease inhibitors and other widely used AIDS drugs can be transmitted from one person to another, it was reported yesterday at the 12th World AIDS Conference.Although only two individuals with such multiple-resistant HIV have been identified so far, they have startled many because they are the first involving transmission of strains of HIV resistant to protease inhibitors, which sparked a revolution in treatment two years ago.Scientists did not believe that such highly mutated viruses were capable of passing from person to person.

To protect patients and doctors from the spread of an escalating disease, former patients of the Johns Hopkins Hospital cancer surgeon who died of AIDS are calling for mandatory screening of hospital patients and hospital surgeons for human immunodeficiency virus, which causes the lethal disease.And, while state law prohibits mandatory screening for HIV, Dr. Hamilton Moses III, Hopkins' vice president of medical affairs, said the hospital would encourage new legislation now that time has brought "a clarification of the disease."

CURRENT volunteer news and needs:Moveable Feast, Inc., which provides food to those who are HIV homebound, is in urgent need of help Tuesday and Friday mornings with food preparation in the Waverly kitchen. Call 243-4604 and leave a message.Pets on Wheels. A benefit gala, ''Bone Voyage,'' will be held from 7 p.m to 1 a.m. Friday, May 31 aboard the Lady Baltimore which will stay docked so that guests can come and go as they please. Tickets are $50 per person and include an auction, food, drink and entertainment on three decks.

When I met a woman I'll call "Mary" in Luwingu, a remote district in northern Zambia, she had already seen three of her children die. She did not know that she had contracted HIV until she arrived at the clinic where for the past few months I had been supervising care for pregnant women living with HIV. Like many women, when she learned that she was HIV-positive, she required counseling to be able to grasp her situation - that she would need...

NEW YORK -- In the past two years, researchers in New York, California and at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control have seen about a dozen people who have all the symptoms of AIDS but do not appear to be infected with HIV, the virus known to cause the disease.These findings raise the possibility that there may be a new virus, or a mutation of the human immunodeficiency virus, which cannot be detected by current tests. But researchers stress that whatever causes these cases is extremely rare.

A county human rights panel has found that the Howard County Medical Society discriminated against a man by denying him a medical referral because he had been exposed to the AIDS virus.In an order issued last week, the panel concluded that "overt discrimination occurred" when the society's secretary told the man that "none of their physicians would accept an HIV positive patient" when he called for a routine medical referral in August of 1988.The panel awarded the former county resident $1,376 in damages to compensate him for the humiliation and mental anguish he suffered as a result of his call to the medical society.

WASHINGTON -- After years of recommending AZT as the first-line drug for treating the virus that causes AIDS, federal health officials are considering a change because of results with other drugs.A large study paid for by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and reported last week found that AZT was less effective than another drug, didanosine (ddI), and also less effective than combinations of AZT with either ddI or zalcitabine (ddC).One part of the study showed that ddI lowered the rate of death from HIV infection to 5 percent from 10 percent, compared with the use of AZT alone over 147 weeks.