Results tagged “HIV Testing” from AIDS & HIV

Detecting whether patients with HIV/AIDS are infected with even small amounts of drug-resistant forms of the virus can be done with a test developed by researchers at Duke University Medical Center.

While other tests only pick up drug-resistant strains when they represent a significant portion of the virus in a person's bloodstream, the test developed at Duke may enable doctors to more accurately predict which medicines will work for patients and which drugs will ultimately fail.

"This can be huge," said Dr. Feng Gao, a Duke HIV/AIDS researcher and co-author of the article published online Sunday in the journal Nature Methods.

Bill Clinton was back on CNN on World AIDS Day being portrayed as an expert on how to stop AIDS. It shows how the media will not let any of Clinton's sex scandals interfere with his public rehabilitation. The Clinton answer, which is quite unique, is to use an international airline tax to buy more anti-AIDS drugs of dubious value.

The U.N.-backed Unitaid agency is using the proceeds from a global airline tax to pay the Clinton Foundation to buy and distribute the drugs. They don't tell you that the drugs are toxic and can kill, or that they may cause the AIDS virus to mutate, making the disease even more deadly. In other words, it's not an issue that the Clinton plan could make the problem worse.

Hong Kong is urging residents who have had unsafe sex to undergo HIV tests after it found two large clusters of new infections that point to an unparalleled fast and local spread of the virus in the city.

"This is a fast spread in a place with low HIV prevalence. We have never seen this before," Wong Ka-hing, a consultant for the Health Department's Special Preventive Program, said in an interview on Thursday.

The two clusters involve 46 men, but authorities have not ruled out the chance of more people, including women, being infected.

The men were diagnosed with HIV between November 2003 and September 2006. Their virus samples were so genetically similar that local scientists believe they probably passed the virus to one another.

A yearlong effort by New York City’s health commissioner to do away with a state requirement that patients give their written consent before being tested for H.I.V. has created a sharp rift among doctors and advocates for people with H.I.V. and AIDS.

More than 1,400 people in the city died from AIDS-related illnesses last year. Of the more than 100,000 New Yorkers who are infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, perhaps one-fifth do not know it, according to city estimates. About one-fourth of H.I.V. diagnoses are made when the patient already has AIDS, by which time the infection has gone undetected for a decade, on average.

Alarmed by those facts, the health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, co-wrote an article in The New England Journal of Medicine a year ago calling for governments to be much more aggressive in monitoring and caring for people with H.I.V., and to treat the virus more like other infectious diseases.

World AIDS Day will be Friday, Dec. 1. Established by the World Health Organization in 1988, World AIDS Day serves to focus global attention on the devastating impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Weld County has the fastest growing HIV rate in the eight-county service region of the Northern Colorado AIDS Project. As of June 30, there were 130 people living with HIV or AIDS in Weld County.

In October the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised the recommendations for HIV testing for the general public. CDC believes that everyone should know whether or not they are infected with HIV because there are important health benefits to this knowledge. People who are HIV negative can take steps to stay that way and those who are infected with HIV can get treatment to improve health and extend life. They can also change their behaviors in order to reduce the chance of passing the virus on to others.

BOSTON -- Health care providers for HIV patients in Massachusetts will now be required to give their patients' names to state authorities for the purpose of more accurately monitoring the number of cases.

Department of Public Health spokeswoman Donna Rheume said the DPH board voted unanimously Tuesday to enact the new regulations after the federal Centers for Disease Control threatened to withhold about $15 million in annual funding. Rheume said the information will be stored in a databank accessible by only a limited number of state health professionals.

"Those names will be kept at the Department of Public Health and will not be released," Rheume said.

Sony's reality show Big Boss seems to have quite caught on the imagination of urban audiences. But when the channel asked its contestants to undergo for a health check including HIV test, the question automatically rises, have Indian audiences finally grown up?

Taking cue from the international hit reality show 'Big Brother', the Indian television screen is now playing host to its version called 'Big Boss'. The show has 13 Indian celebrities, who will spend 3 months in a locked house, moreover they can only leave the house if evicted by public vote. With 13 cameras monitoring their every move, this show feeds on the voyeuristic streak of the viewers.

INDIA, Chandigarh -- The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has positive news for People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHAs). In a path-breaking move that seeks to encourage early testing of HIV/AIDS in India and reduction in mortality, the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) has significantly reduced the cost involved in getting the CD-4 count test.

Until now, each test would cost Rs 500, but not any longer. NACO has notified that the cost of the test will henceforth be half of what it used to be. PLHWAs, who have not yet enrolled for the anti-retroviral therapy (ART), will now be required to pay only Rs 250 for the test.

Further, this test will now be free of cost for all HIV-infected children and HIV positive patients living below the poverty line (BPL). Till October 26 this year — when NACO made the notification — the test was being offered free of cost only to patients already on ART. This test requires to be repeated after every six months.

INDIA - Police say the company Monozyme India sold hundreds of thousands of HIV test kits under false pretenses between April and August 2006. The test kits were actually designed to test for pregnancy and other conditions, and they were sold after Monozyme signed a government contract to distribute them.

Doctors say the kits led to some infected people being cleared to give blood—and possibly infect others with HIV.

The company's owners deny charges of malpractice and forgery. Calcutta-based Govind Sarda and his brother Ghanshyam say the kits were mistakenly distributed after a consignment of what were believed to be HIV/AIDS testing kits were delivered to India from China. The pair were denied bail at their court appearance Monday.

In a sweeping revision of federal guidelines, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended in September that doctors include HIV tests in routine medical care for all Americans between the ages of 13 and 64, regardless of patients' risk.

The aim is to identify the nearly 250,000 Americans believed to have HIV who don't know they are infected.

The guidelines recommend screening all patients ages 13 to 64 at least once, and annual screenings for high-risk patients.

The CDC previously recommended "routine testing" for high-risk groups: intravenous drug users, homosexual males, and people living or working in areas where more than 1 percent of the population is infected with HIV. It also recommends testing for all pregnant women.

by Edwin J. Bernard, Aidsmap, 24 Oct 2006

The first analysis of the impact of a pilot scheme of community-based rapid HIV antibody testing services in England has found them to be highly acceptable to users - many of whom had never previously tested - expanding choice and increasing capacity.

However, the study, presented to last week's British HIV Association (BHIVA) conference in London, also found that establishing community-based rapid testing sites is expensive; that they do not appear to diagnose people any earlier in their disease than standard sexual health clinics; and that more than one-in-eight test results were false-positives.