Immunodeficiency Virus

Adding to a recent surge of AIDS discoveries, scientists are reporting today that a small portion of the Caucasian population is genetically protected from becoming infected with the virus that causes the disease.Scientists did not find this protection among any of the blacks they studied, suggesting that the genetic trait has traveled mainly among whites."This opens up a whole new avenue for designing both diagnostics and therapies," said Dr. Stephen O'Brien, leader of the AIDS genetics research team at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick.

Acknowledging the complexity of getting drugs safely from airports to clinics, leaders in the global fight against AIDS said yesterday that medications should reach 1.5 million people by the end of the year - half the ambitious goal set two years ago. Officials with the World Health Organization and the United Nations program on AIDS said they didn't fully appreciate the challenges of delivering drugs to remote regions of Africa and Asia. "It's easy to get them to the airport, easy to get them to the ports," Dr. Jim Yong Kim, director of the WHO's HIV/AIDS department, said in a telephone news conference from Geneva.

Volunteers from Rude Ranch Animal Rescue, a nonprofit cat shelter in Harwood, will distribute information and answer questions about Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV) and Feline AIDS from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. tomorrow at The Mall in Columbia. Several cats with the disease will be available for adoption. The animals can have a life span of up to 20 years with the disease, said Bob Rude, executive director of the Anne Arundel County shelter. Rude Ranch Animal Rescue rehabilitates neglected, abused and abandoned cats, specializing in those that would otherwise be euthanized.

By hunting and handling fresh primate meat, thousands of rural Africans might be infected with a virus in the same general category as HIV, according to a new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study is the first to document virus transmission from primates to humans in a natural setting. "This is the first real-world evidence that these viruses cross species boundaries. And this appears to be something that is happening regularly," said the study's lead author, Nathan Wolfe, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Q: In the future, could the AIDS virus become airborne?A: Under almost all circumstances, the answer is no. Unlike some other viruses, the AIDS virus (otherwise known as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus -- HIV) is extremely fragile.It cannot live outside the body for very long and is sensitive to heat and drying. That is why the two major methods of transmission for HIV remain sexual intercourse and the sharing of needles. Both of these methods allow for the passage of body fluids (which contain the virus)

A sex hormone whose levels normally soar in the second half of the menstrual cycle can vastly increase a female monkey's chances of getting infected with a monkey version of HIV, researchers report.In a study directed by Dr. Preston A. Marx of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 14 out of 18 monkeys given the sex hormone progesterone became infected with the simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV as compared with 1 out of 10 monkeys that did not receive the hormone.

Across the street from Baltimore's school headquarters, 50 law-enforcement officers waged a carefully orchestrated raid on an apartment building that police say had become a den of illegal drug use and trafficking. Officials from the Baltimore police, the sheriff's office and the municipal housing and education departments flooded the Boundary Square Apartments in the 300 block of E. North Ave. yesterday morning in what authorities said was an effort to "restore order" to the 67-unit property.

BERLIN -- Once at the center of the Cold War's last great propaganda battle, Jakob Segal now sits in his cramped high-rise, pondering why no one believes his theory that the AIDS epidemic was made in Maryland."

Dr. Maxie T. Collier, a former Baltimore City health commissioner and an early champion of needle-exchange programs to prevent the spread of the virus that causes AIDS among intravenous drug abusers, died early yesterday of a massive heart attack at his home in Northwest Baltimore. He was 49.His death came on the day of a surprise 50th wedding anniversary party he had planned for his parents, Pearlie May and James R. Collier, said Catherine Pugh, a family friend."I will remember Maxie as a brilliant psychiatrist and a caring and compassionate public health official," Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke said yesterday in a statement.

More than 30 former patients of a Johns Hopkins Hospital surgeon who died of AIDS filed lawsuits yesterday against the hospital and the doctor's estate, claiming they have suffered emotional distress while worrying that they might contract the disease.The filing of the lawsuits -- which seek a total of $640 million from the hospital and the estate of Dr. Rudolph Almaraz -- comes eight months after the Maryland Court of Appeals reversed a lower court decision and ruled that physicians infected with the human immunodeficiency virus may be held liable if they fail to disclose their conditions.

Volunteers from Rude Ranch Animal Rescue, a nonprofit cat shelter in Harwood, will distribute information and answer questions about Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV) and Feline AIDS from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. tomorrow at The Mall in Columbia. Several cats with the disease will be available for adoption. The animals can have a life span of up to 20 years with the disease, said Bob Rude, executive director of the Anne Arundel County shelter. Rude Ranch Animal Rescue rehabilitates neglected, abused and abandoned cats, specializing in those that would otherwise be euthanized.

Researchers at Baltimore's Institute of Human Virology have announced plans to begin human tests of an oral AIDS vaccine that they say would be cheaper and easier to administer than injectable vaccines now being tried. Testing of a vaccine for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, should begin within 18 months. Testing will be done on volunteers in Baltimore and in Uganda, one of the many African nations ravaged by the fatal disease. The first trial will determine whether the vaccine is safe, and could give way to further studies measuring effectiveness.

Across the street from Baltimore's school headquarters, 50 law-enforcement officers waged a carefully orchestrated raid on an apartment building that police say had become a den of illegal drug use and trafficking. Officials from the Baltimore police, the sheriff's office and the municipal housing and education departments flooded the Boundary Square Apartments in the 300 block of E. North Ave. yesterday morning in what authorities said was an effort to "restore order" to the 67-unit property.

Statistics from a Baltimore nonprofit aid agency suggest the number of homeless people sleeping on city streets increased sharply last year.Health Care for the Homeless (HCH) reports that 925 clients slept on sidewalks, in vacant buildings, under bridges or in the woods at least several times last year, compared with 673 in 1997, an increase of 37 percent."This is very troubling," says Jeff Singer, president and chief executive officer. There was also other bad news, such as increases in uninsured clients and clients diagnosed with the human immunodeficiency virus.

Casting doubt on prospects for an AIDS cure, a leading researcher said yesterday that patients whose viral levels have been pushed to undetectable levels months after starting drug therapy actually harbor a silent infection in "resting cells" of their immune system.Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the existence of a "latent reservoir" of infection suggests that the virus might rebound to dangerous levels if patients ever stopped taking their medications.

BETHESDA -- Signaling a new era in AIDS treatment, an expert panel recommended yesterday that doctors act early and aggressively in attacking the disease with new drug combinations.The recommendations land squarely on the conclusion that protease inhibitors in combination with other anti-viral drugs should be given to everyone who has the disease and to many others who are infected but have not developed symptoms."The guts or the meat of these guidelines is to treat aggressively, to get the virus down as low as possible, for as long as possible," said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease.

WASHINGTON -- Doctors who know they are infected with the AIDS virus and who do not notify their patients should face fines of up to $10,000 and up to 10 years' imprisonment, according to a proposal that Sen. Jesse Helms introduced on the Senate floor yesterday."

MIAMI -- Researchers may have uncovered a reason for a puzzling phenomenon in AIDS transmission -- the mystery of why only 13 to 30 percent of babies with AIDS-infected mothers develop the disease.The mothers' immune systems apparently block all but a few variants of the AIDS virus, researchers at the University of Miami say."Not all of the variants that we see in the mothers are being transmitted to the babies," said Dr. Cecelia Hutto, an associate professor of clinical pediatrics at UM.The study was published yesterday in the journal Science by Dr. Hutto and scientists from Northwestern University, New York University and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Leading researchers applauded President Clinton's announcement yesterday of a 10-year march toward an AIDS vaccine but cautioned that the same problems that have frustrated scientists for years will make the goal a difficult one to achieve.Despite their cautionary tone, scientists said the president has finally made a vaccine against acquired immune deficiency syndrome a national priority -- something lacking since the disease made its ominous entrance in the early 1980s."I think it's something we've got to try," said Dr. John Bartlett, chief of the infectious disease division at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Three years ago, the Howard County Board of Appeals granted Terrific Inc. -- a nonprofit Washington group that cares for children ill with the AIDS virus -- permission to use a more than $600,000 farmhouse on 32 acres in the rural western part of the county as a retreat center for its 65 employees.But since then, neighbors of the property on Ed Warfield Road in an area known as Daisy say the group has not had any retreats there and has used it to hold weekend parties with as many as 20 cars in the driveway at a time.