VIH

Bee Venom Kills HIV: Nanoparticles Carrying Toxin Shown To Destroy Human Immunodeficiency Virus

Bee Venom Kills HivCan bee venom help combat HIV? According to one new study, it can.

A new study has shown that bee venom can kill the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have demonstrated that a toxin called melittin found in bee venom can destroy HIV by poking holes in the envelope surrounding the virus, according to a news release sent out by Washington University.

Visit Washington University’s website to read more about the study.

Nanoparticles smaller than HIV were infused with the bee venom toxin, explains U.S. News & World Report. A “protective bumper” was added to the nanoparticle’s surface, allowing it to bounce off normal cells and leave them intact. Normal cells are larger than HIV, so the nanoparticles target HIV, which is so small it fits between the bumpers.

“Melittin on the nanoparticles fuses with the viral envelope,” said research instructor Joshua L. Hood, MD, PhD, via the news release. “The melittin forms little pore-like attack complexes and ruptures the envelope, stripping it off the virus.” Adding, “We are attacking an inherent physical property of HIV. Theoretically, there isn’t any way for the virus to adapt to that. The virus has to have a protective coat, a double-layered membrane that covers the virus.”

This revelation can lead to the development of a vaginal gel to prevent the spread of HIV and, it seems, an intravenous treatment to help those already infected. “Our hope is that in places where HIV is running rampant, people could use this gel as a preventive measure to stop the initial infection,” said Hood.

The bee venom HIV study was published on Thursday in the journal Antiviral Therapy, according to U.S. News & World Report.

This study comes on the heels of news that a Mississippi baby with HIV has apparently been cured. The mother was diagnosed with HIV during labor and the baby received a three-drug treatment just 30 hours after birth, before tests confirmed the infant was infected. The child, now 2 years old, has been off medication for about a year and shows no sign of infection.

More than 34 million people are living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, according to amFAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research. Of these, 3.3 million are under the age of 15 years old. Each day, almost 7,000 people contract HIV around the globe.

Patients discover a lifeline in medicinal marijuana →

cannabis-alchemist:

Quote:

Steve Cooley, a PS Organica patient who’s been HIV positive for 31 years, credits the use of medical marijuana for saving his life.

“It stops the HIV reproduction. It keeps it in check. My T (cell) counts are back to normal,” he said.

A research report published in March by scientists at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York shows marijuana may block a form of HIV found in late-stage AIDS and suggests further study.

From Me to You: Tips on Dealing With an HIV/AIDS Diagnosis - HIV/AIDS Resource Center for the Newly Diagnosed - TheBody.com →

We don’t want to make light of what you’re going through. Getting an HIV diagnosis may feel like the worst thing that has ever happened to you. BUT PAY ATTENTION TO THIS: There is life after testing positive. So,TAKE A DEEP BREATH. No matter how alone you may feel right now, know that there is a big community of men and women out there ready to provide information, support, advice and many other resources. Browse through these pages and and gather strength from people living with HIV.

Click Here

Treatment News : Certain Meds Mixed With Grapefruit Juice Can Be a Fatal Cocktail →

imageThe Canadian scientist who first discovered that grapefruit can alter certain prescription drug levels in the body has released an updated list of 85 medications that may cause such reactions, 43 of which can cause fatal interactions, The New York Times reports. A clinical pharmacologist at the Lawson Health Research Institute in London, Ontario, David Bailey, PhD, updated his list to reflect releases of new medications over the past four years. The list includes drugs to treat HIV, high cholesterol and cancer, as well as immunosuppressants, psychotropic medications, synthetic opioids, birth control and estrogen.

How often such reactions occur is up for debate, but Bailey stresses that however rare they may be, anyone taking prescription medication and consuming grapefruit juice or grapefruit, as well as pomelo, lime and marmalade, should consult the list of drugs and monitor for symptoms that may indicate a side effect of the combination. Timing of grapefruit consumption is not relevant; it must be avoided entirely to avoid the potential interaction.

To see the full list of medications, click here.

To read the New York Times report, click here. 

Huge Breakthrough In HIV Research Brings Us Closer To A Vaccine →

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Jan 4, 2013 at 2:00 pm

A team of Spanish researchers say they have made an important breakthrough in HIV research, developing a new vaccine against the virus that is significantly more effective than earlier attempts. Advancing vaccine research could eventually eliminate the need for the expensive methods currently used to treat HIV-positive individuals.

Researchers tested the vaccine on randomly selected HIV-positive individuals who were already taking highly active antiretroviral of treatment currently available to combat the virus. They wanted to see if, rather than simply suppressing the effects of the virus with outside treatment, their vaccine could lead the human immune system to coordinate its own defense against HIV — and they succeeded, seeing some subjects’ HIV viral loads drop more than 90 percent after 12 weeks of the trial:

“What we did was give instructions to the immune system so it could learn to destroy the virus, which it does not do naturally,” said Felipe Garcia, one of the scientists in the team at Barcelona University’s Hospital Clinic.
The therapeutic vaccine, a shot that treats an existing disease rather than preventing it, was safe and led to a dramatic drop in the amount of HIV virus detected in some patients, said the study, published Wednesday in Science Translation Medicine. […]
The vaccine allowed patients temporarily to live without taking multiple medicines on a daily basis, which created hardship for patients, could have toxic side-effects over the long term and had a high financial price, the team said.
“This investigation opens the path to additional studies with the final goal of achieving a functional cure — the control of HIV replication for long periods or an entire life without anti-retroviral treatment,” the researchers said in a statement.

The researchers did find that the effectiveness of the vaccination declined after the first year, when patients had to return to their previous HAART treatment. Still, though, they noted this breakthrough is the culmination of seven years of research — and they will spend the next several years working to improve the vaccine even further.

Over the past year, the global community has made significant strides forward in its mission to eradicate the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This latest scientific progress builds upon previous research and policy advances that have contributed to better tests and treatments for HIV, better health care for HIV-positive individuals, and ever-increasinglife expectancy rates for those living with the virus.therapy (HAART) medications, the most scientifically advanced form 

by Mark S. King: The Private War That Killed Spencer Cox

“My most courageous self, the best man that I’ll ever be, lived more than two decades ago during the first years of a horrific plague… I miss the man I was forced to become.”

– “Once, When We Were Heroes,” 2007

AIDS did not kill Spencer Cox in the first, bloodiest battles of the 1980’s. It spared him that.

The reprieve allowed Spencer’s brilliance as co-founder of the Treatment Action Group(TAG) to forge new FDA guidelines for drug approval and help make effective HIV medications a reality, saving an untold number of lives.

Such triumph by a man still in his twenties might have signaled even greater achievements ahead. Instead, Spencer found himself adrift in the same personal crisis as many of his contemporaries, who struggled for a meaningful existence after years of combating the most frightening public health crisis of modern times.

Gay activists like Spencer were consumed by AIDS for so many gruesome years that many of them were shocked, once the war abated, to see how little around them had changed. Climbing from the trenches, they saw a gay culture that must have seemed ludicrous, packed with the same drug addictions, sexual compulsions and soulless shenanigans that AIDS, in its singular act of goodwill, had arrested for a decade or so.

They found themselves in a world in which no one wants to see battle scars, where intimacy is manufactured on keyboards and web sites, where any sense of community had long since faded from the AIDS organizations and now only makes brief appearances in 12-step meetings, or as likely, in the fraternity of active crystal meth addicts chasing deliverance in a dangerous shell game of bliss and desolation.

The dark allure of meth, a drug so devoured and fetished by gay men today that it is now aleading indicator of new HIV infections, enticed Spencer at some point along the way. The drug is known to whisper empty promises about limitless power and sexual escape, while calming the addict’s ghosts and sorrows for miserably brief periods of time.

When Spencer Cox died on December 18, 2012, in New York City, the official cause of death was AIDS-related complications, which is understandable if post-traumatic stress, despair and drug addiction are complications related to AIDS.

Spencer believed that this connection exists. His own writings for the Medius Institute for Gay Men’s Health (an organization he co-founded after his work with TAG) focus on exactly the issues that were distressing him personally: Crystal meth abuse. Loneliness. Risk taking. Feelings of confusion after years of accomplishment and purpose.

In retrospect you can read his work and break the private code written between the lines. It spells out “HELP ME.”

Spencer’s life during this period and beyond was difficult, by many accounts. The Medius Institute failed due to a lack of funding, defeating Spencer’s effort to address mental health issues among gay men. His drug addiction spiraled and ebbed and raged again, until he finally retreated to Georgia to live with family for a few years.

When Spencer returned to New York City last September, many of his closest friends had lost track of him. There is uncertainty about his last months, and no evidence that his addiction was active, but what little medication compliance he managed had been abandoned completely, setting the stage for his final hospitalization.

Spencer Cox died without the benefit of the very drugs he had helped make available to the world. He perished from pneumonia, in an ironic clinical time warp that transported him back to 1985. It was as if, having survived the deadliest years of AIDS, having come so close to complete escape, Spencer was snatched up by the Fates in a vengeful piece of unfinished business.

AIDS has always been creative in its cruelty. And it has learned to reach through the decades with the second-hand tools of disillusionment and depression and heart-numbing traumas. Or, perhaps, using the simple weapon of crystal meth, with all of its seductions and deceits.

Yes. There are many complications related to AIDS.

To consider “survivor’s guilt” the culprit behind the death of Spencer Cox is a popular explanation but not necessarily an accurate one. That condition suggests surviving when other, presumably worthier people, did not. Sometimes guilt has nothing to do with it.

For many of our AIDS war veterans, the real challenge today is living with the horror of having survived at all.

Mark

(PHOTO CREDIT: Walter Kurtz)

Mortality: H.I.V.-Positive Smokers Lose More Years to Tobacco Than to the Virus, a Study Says →

A Danish study of almost 3,000 H.I.V. patients also found that the risk of early death from cancer or heart disease was much higher among infected smokers than among non-infected ones.

H.I.V. patients who obtain good treatment but who smoke lose more years of life to tobacco than to the virus, a new Danish study has found.

The study, which looked at nearly 3,000 Danish H.I.V. patients from 1995 — the year antiretroviral triple therapy became standard — to 2010, was published online last month by the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

A 35-year-old H.I.V. patient who did not smoke was likely to live to age 78, while one who smoked was likely to die before age 63, the report found.

(The study’s authors said they excluded people who inject drugs, even though most addicts smoke, because their “risk-taking behavior” and causes of death “differ significantly from the rest of the H.I.V.-infected population.”)

The study also compared Danish H.I.V. patients with a pool of 10,642 average Danes of the same age and sex. H.I.V. appeared to make smoking much more lethal. The risk of early death from cancer or heart disease was much higher among infected smokers than among noninfected ones, and smoking was more closely linked to early death than was obesity, excess drinking or baseline viral load (a measure of how sick a patient was at diagnosis).

Denmark has universal health care. H.I.V. drugs are free and care is coordinated by AIDS centers around the country. “Treatment failures and loss to follow-up are rare,” the study said. It urged doctors to strongly advise their H.I.V. patients to quit smoking.

HIV-positive Koreans worry about being shut out of employment →

pozliving:

This is fucking insane too.

by Um Ji-won, staff reporter

It was a dream job. Back in October, Jeong Myeong-jin, 27, (not his real name) landed a job at a major corporate affiliate.

But while the other successful candidates were rejoicing, he was very troubled. Before being hired on, he had to undergo a physical screening. The checkup form passed out at the designated hospital included a category for human immunodeficiency virus.

Jeong is HIV-positive.

“I had no idea they would do that kind of testing before hiring,” he recalled. “At the hospital, they told me the company insisted on it.”

What the affiliate did was illegal. Article 8, Item 1 of the AIDS Prevention Act, enacted to protect the rights of HIV-positive individuals, states that those performing physical examinations may not notify anyone but the examinee of the test results. Those who violate the law are subject to up to one year in prison and a fine of up to 3 million won (US$2,770).

On the advice of a lawyer, Jeong sent an anonymous statement of opinion to the hospital. The hospital was unaware that it was even illegal to tell a company the results of an individual’s physical screening. In the end, the affiliate conducted all examinations except for an HIV screening. Jeong passed, but his worries remain.

“Even if I make it through one year, there are going to be workplace screenings,” he said. “Every time we have one, I’m going to have to worry about whether they’re going to find out I’m infected.”

HIV-positive people are demanding guarantees on their right to work ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1. The HIV-positive population in South Korea nearly doubled between 2006 and 2011, rising from 4,500 to 8,500. More than half of these people are in their twenties or thirties - right when they are finding employment. But many are giving up on the possibility of a career and resigning themselves to poverty.

Physical screenings for new and existing employees are the major stumbling block. HIV status is not part of the general health screening data that employers have to provide for their workers. It is typically included in hiring tests and workplace screenings only when the company demands it or the hospital offers it as a courtesy. Occasionally, this means that people find out about infections they never knew they had, and end up being summarily ejected from the company.

While most of the public view AIDS as a fearsome contagion, its actual transmissibility is very low. The rate of transmission is on the order of one in a thousand even for unprotected intercourse. And with an 82.2% survival rate, HIV-positive individuals can work freely with regular treatment.

“As treatment methods have developed, other countries have come to see AIDS as a manageable chronic ailment like high blood pressure or hepatitis,” explained Inha University Medical School professor Lee Hun-jae. “Its medical severity is roughly equivalent to diabetes. It poses no problem to working at a company.”

According to Lee, company health procedures that “weed out” HIV-positive employees who are healthy enough to work are merely creating discrimination and stigma.

“A,” 46, who until just a few years ago was working at a mid-sized company in Seoul, was summoned to human resources repeatedly after a regular workplace screening. Having learned that A was HIV-positive, the team said that the health screening “turned up something that is not suited to our work.”

A quit, but had no family to depend on. Treatment costs come out A’s basic livelihood security benefits. The drugs are free for those on basic livelihood security, but once a person starts receiving benefits, the chance of returning to work slips farther out of reach.

The number of HIV-positive beneficiaries like A rose from 962 to 1,210 in the three years between 2008 and 2011. They represent more than 14% of South Korea‘s HIV-population. For the past three years, the government’s annual budget to support HIV-positive individuals in finding jobs has remained stuck at 80 million won (US$73,800).

Gwon Mi-ran of Nanuri Plus, an AIDS human rights advocacy group, said people with HIV end up stuck in a vicious cycle as long as society does not guarantee them the opportunity to work.

“Guaranteeing the right to work is a minimal requirement for HIV-positive people whose lives and finances have hit rock bottom because of the social stigma,” she added.

via TheHankyoreh

Upsetting