HIV/AIDS Awareness. A father’s choice.

Posts Tagged ‘hiv news’

I started out to write a blog post about the true impacts of research news on the daily lives of those with HIV/AIDS. Part of what we do at http://myhivaidsawareness.com is to review each day what is happening the areas of prevention, treatment, care and research.

But then I came across an article posted in Business Week – http://bit.ly/c49GXl – and a few other publications that said, “Morphine May Protect Brains of People With HIV.” I looked a little further and found they studied this because doctors saw that HIV+ heroin users were not developing AIDS-related dementia. Okay, but doesn’t morphine have huge addictive and tolerance problems? Are we telling people to start using morphine or its close relative heroin?

To get past the headline, I looked a little deeper into HIV and heroin. Other research has found that drugs like morphine and heroin suppress the immune system and enhance the inflammatory effects of HIV on brain encephalitis. In other words, they can make you much worse.

You have to read past the headline and find that doctors are saying that a morphine-like substance could be developed that does not have the typical dependency and tolerance issues. They aren’t saying use heroin or morphine to protect your brain. But the headline sure sounded like an endorsement of morphine and no such morphine-like substance now exists.

Research is defined as the “systematic investigation to establish facts.” Individual research projects only look at a very tiny part of the whole HIV puzzle. Many times they present conflicting information that can be very confusing if you are trying to figure out a treatment regimen that works for you.

Most importantly, when we report on and/or hear about new research, we have to remember that impact of most research is years away. Just in the past few months we have heard about the potential importance of bananas, an acne drug, and some common anti-biotics in HIV treatment and prevention. But where does it fit in your treatment today?

We will continue to review and share the latest research findings especially those that hold promise for the future. But it is important to never forget that your treatment today is what impacts your future.

If you have questions about treatment, please check with your medical provider. If you wish to have some additional information about HIV treatment, I recommend some of these great resources that are available from Project Inform:

http://www.projectinform.org/info/decisions/decisions.pdf

http://www.projectinform.org/info/avs/avs.pdf

Last week, scientists at Johns Hopkins University made a startling announcement.

The common and  inexpensive antibiotic known as minocycline has been used to treat acne. Researchers found it effectively targets infected immune cells where HIV lies dormant and prevents them from reactivating and replicating.

Minocycline can be used in combination with a standard drug therapy we know as HAART (Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy), according to this new research published online and appearing in April 15, 2020 edition of  The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

“The powerful advantage to using minocycline is that the virus appears less able to develop drug resistance because minocycline targets cellular pathways not viral proteins,” says Janice Clements, Ph.D., Mary Wallace Stanton Professor of Faculty Affairs, vice dean for faculty, and professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in their press release.

She went on to say that the big challenge for doctors is to keep the HIV in a dormant state and minocyline is another arm of the defense against HIV.

To read more about this new breakthrough, please go to http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2010/03_18a_10.html.

image courtesy of dailymail.com 

 Did you know that if you had HIV, the United States restricted you from being in the country for over 30 days?  After 22 years, the American ban on HIV positive international travelers was lifted on January 5, 2010. The ban was instituted at the beginning of the AIDS pandemic, and was driven by fear, rather than medical science. It dates back to the early history of HIV, where U..S. policy considered it to be a communicable disease. Doctors, scientists, and many politicians had campaigned for it to be removed from the beginning. Foreign visitors who had the virus were able to get temporary visas, but were not able to stay longer than thirty days. This prevented them from working or studying in the United States.

Joe Somonese, speaking for the Human Rights Campaign, stated: “Today, a sad chapter in our nation’s response to people with HIV and AIDS has finally come to a close and we are a better nation for it. This policy, in place for more than two decades, was unnecessary, ineffective and lacked any public health justification.”

image courtesy of harpas.org

Other nations that still maintain a similar ban are Russia, Israel, New Zealand, Egypt, Poland and China.

U.S. Lifts Travel Ban for People with HIV