Religious Leaders to Fight HIV Stigma

VOA News 23/03/2010

Spiritual leaders from around the world are meeting in The Netherlands to discuss their response to HIV/AIDS. Selah Hennessy spoke to African church leaders for VOA about how they can use their influence to fight the stigma surrounding the disease.

Reverend Patricia Sawo is a pastor at the Calvary Celebration Church in Kenya and the mother of 10 children.

Sawo found out she was HIV positive more than a decade ago. She says before then she had been misinformed about the disease.

"Before I was confronted with my own HIV status, I knew that HIV was a disease for the sinners, and that is how it was presented," she said.

When she learned she was HIV-positive she lost her position in the church. But she learned more about HIV/AIDS and has retaken charge of her church and says she aims to teach her congregation the facts.

"There were people already in the church who were actually having HIV and who were hopeless and did not have anywhere to turn to," she said. "So my coming back into the church with the good news in itself started an automatic support group within the church. That Sunday that I spoke in the Sunday service, in the evening there were eight people who came to confide in me and just to tell me that they were there and they were living with HIV and we needed to find more information," she explained.

Why circumcised men are less likely to get HIV

The Times of India 06/01/2010

According to scientists at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and Johns Hopkins University the strongest evidence for a cause-and-effect relationship between circumcision and HIV risk reduction came from three randomized-control trials in sub-Saharan Africa, where the circumcision rate is relatively low and the HIV infection rate is relatively high.

All the studies showed more than 40 percent reduction in HIV acquisition among circumcised men.

The new study found that circumcision - the removal of the foreskin, or prepuce, from the penis - eliminates an area of mucous membrane and dramatically changes the penile bacterial ecosystem.

“Our randomized trials have shown that male circumcision prevents HIV infection in men and protects their female partners from vaginal infections, especially bacterial vaginosis. It is possible that the virtual elimination of anaerobic bacteria by circumcision contributes to these benefits of the procedure," said Ronald H. Gray, a renowned epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins and the scientific paper’s senior author.

Scientists Discover Anti-HIV Molecule That May Prevent Infection

VOA News 04/01/2010

A team of American scientists has discovered a molecule that could block transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Researchers say the preventive agent might someday be used in a topical cream to help prevent infection with the deadly virus.

Scientists have long known that after the HIV virus enters the human body, it struggles to gain a foothold. But a naturally occurring protein in the male's seminal fluid, called SEVI, makes the virus 100-thousand times more infectious than it would otherwise be, aiding HIV's ability to attach itself to its victim's white blood cells and in so doing, destroy the host immune system.

Now, US investigators have discovered that a molecule called surfen can interfere with SEVI's action. Warner Greene is the director of the Gladstone Institute of virology and immunology in San Francisco, California, where the test-tube studies have been conducted.

"What we have found is this small molecule by the name of surfen can block SEVI binding to HIV virions [viruses] and thus interrupt the infectious cycle or the transmission cycle," said Warner Greene.

Senior UN AIDS Official Says Asia Close to Winning AIDS Treatment Battle

VOA News 31/12/2009

A top United Nations official says much of the Asia-Pacific region is nearing full treatment coverage for patients with HIV. But Prasada Rao warns access to remote regions in China and India, and disrupted AIDS programs in Pakistan and Afghanistan leave millions at risk.

The departing head of the U.N. AIDS program in the Asia-Pacific region, Prasada Rao, says the region is within three years of "winning the battle" against the AIDS pandemic.

Rao, who has led the U.N. AIDS program in the region for the past five years, says increased treatment coverage and intervention programs are turning the tide against AIDS.

In Thailand and Cambodia treatment coverage has reached almost 90 percent. In India 50 percent of patients get treatment, but in China the number stands at 30 percent and 35 percent in Burma.

"By 2012, up to 2013, I can see that we'll start winning the battle around that time. And by 2015 - this is the Millennium Development Goal of halting and reversing the epidemic - I can say that the majority of countries in this region would be in a position to say that 'yes' we can halt and reverse the epidemic," he said.

In South and Southeast Asia the rate of new HIV infections has fallen by more than 10 percent since 2001, thanks to an increase in prevention and treatment programs. But there are still 4.7 million people living with AIDS in the region and around 350,000 new infections each year.

Rao acknowledges that concerns remain, especially because of problems expanding AIDS programs in remote locations in China, India and Indonesia.

Indonesia's Papua province and neighboring Papua New Guinea have seen cases rise sharply in the past few years. The U.N. predicts that by 2012 about five percent of Papua New Guinea's population will be infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS - more than 208,000 people.

"The most challenging to me is the Papua New Guinea scenario where I think it's not just the reachability [of treatment programs] that is important but the strength of the health system itself by which it delivers services - it is a big question," he said.

25m lives loose to AIDS

AIDS has killed 25 million people worldwide but new infections are slowing sharply, the UN said on Tuesday as it issued its annual report that mixed hope with a warning against complacency.

Almost 60 million people have been infected by the HIV virus since it was first recorded but prevention programmes are having a significant impact, the UNAIDS agency said in its latest report, released here in Shanghai.

Around two million people died of the disease in 2008, bringing the overall toll to around 25 million since the virus was first detected three decades ago. The UN figures

Some 2.7 million were newly infected in 2008, it added, bringing the world total to 33.4 million.

Michel Sidibe, UNAIDS executive director, told a Shanghai news conference on the report's launch that the number of new human immunodeficiency (HIV) virus infections has been reduced by 17 percent over the past eight years.

"The good news is that we have evidence that the declines we are seeing are due, at least in part, to HIV prevention," Sidibe said.

Some of the most notable progress has been reported in Africa, the report said.

HIV incidence has fallen by 25 percent since 2001 in East Africa while the figure for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole was around 15 percent -- equating to around 400,000 fewer infections in 2008.

In South and South East Asia, HIV incidence has declined by 10 percent in the same time period, the report said.