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HIV Soap Opera from India

Soap Opera Special made in India by Search For A Cure for Education

HIV in Malawi

Documentary of the HIV Epidemic in Malawi, Africa made by Search

World AIDS Day 08

This is inspiring.

Cure for HIV in 08

Listen to this one.

HIV Awareness

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Let's Talk About HIV

Watch this brief effort

Fighting HIV

An interesting Effort

Hot Docs: AIDS in America, Criminalizing HIV, Obama's National Security Team

AIDS and HIV in the United States: AIDS is the No. 1 killer of black women between the ages of 25 and 34, says a new report by the Center for American Progress, released to mark World AIDS Day.

Criminalizing HIV: With the high rates of people infected with HIV, many sub-Saharan African countries have passed criminal laws to try to prevent further spread of the virus. A report from the U.N.'s Integrated Regional Information Networks' PlusNews service discusses the existing and proposed laws and their impact. More than 10 countries in West Africa have passed laws concerning HIV.

Obama National Security Team Announced: Calling this "a new dawn of American leadership," President-elect Barack Obama announced more key administration posts on Monday when he named six people to his national security team. Sen. Hillary Clinton will serve as secretary of state while Robert Gates will continue as secretary of defense. Former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano will head the Department of Homeland Security, and Susan Rice was named ambassador to the United Nations.

Caring for children with AIDS: new challenges for medicine and society.

Cooper ER. Department of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, Boston City Hospital, Boston University School of Medicine, Mass.

Caring for HIV-infected children under 13 years of age poses a serious and steadily increasing challenge to our society. Children with AIDS face devastating medical and psychosocial problems. Because of the unique implications for the entire family when a child is found to be HIV-infected, the health care profession is obliged to confront complex legal and psychosocial issues heretofore unparalleled in modern medicine. Decisions that concern schooling and daycare for the asymptomatic but HIV-seropositive individual are often influenced more by public frenzy than scientific information. Issues regarding reproductive choice and responsible parenthood are all confounded by debilitating and eventually fatal illness in infected parents. Problems of custody and foster care require innovative strategies to avoid further burden to an already stressed system. AIDS has become a disease for which research is standard of care. Access to experimental protocols is complicated by geographic location, public funding, and complexities of informed consent. The responsibility of the physician to an individual patient must be considered, and must be given its proper place within the broader responsibility to science and society.

The IAVI Mission

IAVI’s mission is to ensure the development of safe, effective, accessible, preventive HIV vaccines for use throughout the world. IAVI is a global not-for-profit, public-private partnership working to accelerate the development of a vaccine to prevent HIV infection and AIDS. Founded in 1996, IAVI researches and develops vaccine candidates, conducts policy analyses, and serves as an advocate for the field with offices in Africa, India, and Europe. IAVI supports a comprehensive approach to HIV and AIDS that balances the expansion and strengthening of existing HIV prevention and treatment programs with targeted investments in new AIDS prevention technologies. As the world’s only organization focused solely on the development of an AIDS vaccine, IAVI also works to ensure a future vaccine will be accessible to all who need it.

Please visit the links below to learn more about IAVI’s activities.

Research and Development Partnering with Developing Countries Public Policy and Advocacy
IAVI in Africa IAVI in Europe IAVI in India

The release of zinc ions from and cytocompatibility of two zinc oxide dressings.

M S Agren, U Mirastschijski Department of Surgery K, Bispebjerg Hospital, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

OBJECTIVE: These in vitro studies examined the release of zinc ions from and the response of human dermal fibroblasts to two zinc oxide-medicated dressings: one with zinc oxide in an ointment base and one using polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP), a hydrophilic polymer for the binding of zinc oxide particles. METHOD: Zinc release from the dressings in buffered-saline (pH 7.4) was studied through a high-pore-density membrane (pore size, 0.40 microm) in a two-compartment model at 37 degrees C for three hours. Cytocompatibility of the dressings and 500 micromol/l of zinc ions was assessed using the MTT (3-[4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl]-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide) assay after exposure to monolayers of confluent normal human dermal fibroblasts to the dressing extracts for four hours. RESULTS: The zinc release rate from PVP-bound zinc oxide was more than two-fold higher than from zinc oxide in the ointment. Extract of the zinc oxide ointment, containing 150 micromol/l solubilised zinc, elicited a cytotoxic reaction, while the zinc oxide-PVP extract, containing 410 micromol/l solubilised zinc, and 500 micromol/l zinc chloride were non-cytotoxic to the fibroblasts. CONCLUSION: Zinc release in a simulated wound milieu appears to be inhibited when zinc oxide is incorporated in a lipophilic vehicle. It is hypothesised that the ointment vehicle induced cytotoxicity rather then the solubilised zinc oxide.

Fixing the Body

Written by David

Thursday, 17 December 2009 17:35

Fixing the Body

An Immune Based Approach to HIV

By Search For A Cure under review of John James, AIDS Treatment News

www.aidsnews.org

December, 2009

1. It’s the Virus, Stupid

By now most people know HIV causes AIDS. But this is actually inaccurate. To understand why this is inaccurate helps explain why there are two different ways scientists are trying to figure out how to treat AIDS.

2. What Causes AIDS

AIDS is a condition in which a person is not able to fight off many illnesses that the body generally can get rid of or can learn to live with. The illnesses that kill people with AIDS get are called “opportunistic infections” because they take advantage of a problem HIV sets in motion—the slaughter of many different types of t helper cells. Before turning attention to how the t helper cells are killed off, let’s look at how these t helper cells protect us in the first place.

3. How t cells protect us

The immune system is our protection against disease, and it has many parts.

The simplest parts are barriers stopping germs from getting into important parts of our body, for example, our skin. Another part is cells that are pre-programmed to kill off certain illness causing germs the body already knows about.

Then there is a third part that is much more creative and adaptable. This is the part of the immune system that can recognize a new enemy germ, raise an army of fighter cells that are taught what the enemy looks like and gun down the enemy, attacking it either directly with chemical weapons like ‘neutralizing antibody’ (stuff that sticks to the germ like glue and kills it or stops it from working), or indirectly by killing cells that hide it or help make more of it. In other words - by killing off infected cells that have been hijacked by the virus.

Infected cells hijacked by the virus are reprogrammed by the virus to manufacture more of itself. To get rid of that kind of infection we have to kill off those infected cells. The body does this with T helper cells.

T helper cells are the part of the immune system that recognize the new kinds of intruders, train the army, and hunt down the infected cells. After ‘learning’ that a virus is an enemy, the T helper cells send out messages that get a different group of killer cells to do an investigation and terminate anything infected. This in most cases eventually can cure us of the illness or at least hold it in check.

4. How do t helper cells learn that some virus is an enemy?

It turns out that all living things are made up of chemicals that we understand pretty well. The same set of chemicals which, when you break them down, form long chains of simple things called peptides. T helper cells can tell which peptides are parts of you and which belong to something that should not be inside of you. When they ‘recognize’ a peptide or bunch of peptides that don’t belong in you, they mobilize the immune system in a lot of different ways to get rid of the virus that the foreign peptide(s) are part of.

T helper cells are all born different, recognizing different specific peptides. They form a kind of alphabet, so that the ‘z’ T helper cells would know right away that a virus spelled ‘zebra’ was a bad guy because they would recognize ‘z’ and know that you don’t have a ‘z’. They would alert everyone in the immune system that you have been attacked by zebra and hence kill off the cells that are making more zebra grow inside of you.

But in the case of late stage HIV progressing to AIDS, your cells lose this ability—why?

5. How do the t helper cells lose this ability to tell ‘zebra virus’ attacked you?

If something is killing off T cells, and if there are only a limited number of T cells that can recognize ‘zebra’ then when there are none of those cells left, if zebra attacks you, it will be very hard for you to fight zebra. For one thing it will take you a long time to realize that zebra is even there doing damage.

So when enough cells are killed off so that the ‘z’ T helper cells are gone from your repertoire, your alphabet of T cells is missing an important one that makes you vulnerable to zebra if it attacks. One letter after another disappears, as more and more T cells disappear, you become less and less able to fight more and more illnesses and this condition is called “AIDS”.

Importantly the virus HIV is not directly making the T helper cells vanish— the disappearing act is being caused by something else.

6. What is killing off the t helper cells?

It has been known for a long time that a killer cell (whose job it is to kill off infected cells) also kills off uninfected cells that look a lot like the infected ones— we might call them ‘bystander’ T cells. The killer cell is called a ‘CD8+cytotoxic lymphocyte’ and they get hyperactive when HIV is around. So much so that for every cell actually infected with HIV they kill hundreds or thousands of uninfected T helper cells and they slowly reduce your total healthy T cell repertoire lower and lower and lower. This overkill from hyperactive killer cells (CD8's) is what causes you to get AIDS, not the actual virus.

[A technical note: In the early 1990s, Joyce Zarling, Leonard Adelman and Allen D. Allen, working independently, proved to a scientific certainty that it was the cytotoxic CD8 T cells that were indiscriminately killing off CD4 T cells. This was published in prominent journals, such as Journal of Immunology, AIDS, etc. and led Allen to invent Cytolin. ]

7. How could we stop this from happening?

Well the killing cells would calm down if we got rid of HIV, which is what antiretrovirals (the medicines that stop HIV from making more HIV) accomplish. However there are several problems with this approach that has worked wonderfully keeping millions of people alive for many, many years.

The problems are: the medicines are expensive, have side effects and the virus can sometimes get resistant to them.

For this reason it would be useful to have a medicine or a group of medicines which the virus does not get resistant to, which are not too expensive and which would help calm down the killer cells a little. Acting like a brake on their hyperactivity, this would help the body keep healthy T cells around to do their work preventing opportunistic infections, and therefore avoiding AIDS.

We have known for some time that this approach would work because we have had medicines that calm down or slow down the immune system, like cyclosporine A for example. When you use these types of drugs on people with HIV you can show that T cells are no longer being killed off and actually the amount of virus goes down. However these early immune tranquilizers were just as over reactive as the CD8’s we are trying to calm down, and made the immune system unable to protect us from many illnesses.

But now there are some ‘immune modulators’ (or for analogy ‘brakes’) that make the killing cells less hyperactive, but allow them to still kill off the already infected cells, and allow them to still protect against other infections as the body gets attacked.

One of these immune modulators, called “Cytolin”, is what scientists call a ‘monoclonal antibody’ and it makes the killer cells less crazy. During the height of the AIDS pandemic before the antiviral cocktails were available, activist doctors used Cytolin to rescue a few hundred patients. Data from 188 patients treated with Cytolin for 18 months were reported to the FDA]. A Phase I(b)/II(a) study of Cytolin was reported at a CROI national conference by Donald W. Northfeld, MD.

This drug is being developed by a west coast company called CytoDyn and is being studied by Eric Rosenberg, M.D. who is a scientist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and we are hoping that within a year we can get more information on how the medicine works on people with HIV.

8. Why would we think this drug might work?

Because before 1996 when viral cocktails were invented, many doctors used this drug on many patients (188 of them) and we know from the records of those patients that the drug seemed to help them.

In general, using the antibody showed some return in the ability to fight illnesses, an increased number of T cells, and a drop in the amount of virus. The way scientists measured this was to use a test of the body’s ability to recognize enemy germs, a skin test and it was clear that people who were not able to fight some illnesses got this ability back after using the antibody. Some of the well known scientists who worked with this antibody years ago were contacted by the non-profit organization Search For A Cure and interviewed. All of them indicated that they would like to see Cytolin studied because they felt it had potential.

9. What is happening now?

Search For A Cure researched this drug and helped get a clear strategy for studying it underway. The testing will first happen in vitro (in the test tube) and later in people.

There are several ways studying the drug might be helpful:

1.   To protect the antivirals from resistant strains of HIV emerging as the virus cannot get resistant to Cytolin

2.   To see exactly how Cytolin protects T cells and through this to better understand the errors made by the immune system that leads to AIDS

3.   To see if some version or amount of Cytolin might be able to help people avoid needing the use of antivirals for long periods of time

The research will take a good deal of time, but many specialized scientists are convinced that the monoclonal antibody is a good way to help the body fight against its own over reaction to HIV and protect its immune system. This would make Cytolin the first Immune Based Therapy (IBT) in existence for HIV. There are others like Interferon alpha for Hepatitis C for example, but none for HIV.

12. How can I get more information?

For more information:

Contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and we can send you more information. If you are interested in technical materials, we can email them too you. You can also check the CytoDyn website where a good deal of data is available. Eventually the results of the studies will be available to everyone.

Last Updated on Tuesday, 19 January 2010 13:31

Question: Am I HIV Infected?

Answer: Unfortunately, HIV is not as easily diagnosed as you would think. Understandably, people who think they may have been infected are afraid; they are afraid to see a doctor and they are afraid to get tested. These simple steps will help you find out if you have indeed been infected.

Step 1 - Are you having symptoms?

Not everyone who has been HIV infected will shows signs of the infection. Others may have symptoms that are much like other very common illnesses such as the flu. What symptoms if any do you have? Are they symptoms of HIV?

Step 2 - Get examined by your doctor.
As stated earlier, if you are having symptoms they may be very similar to other common illnesses and infections. If you are feeling ill, don't assume you are infected and don't try to diagnose your symptoms yourself. Find a doctor, schedule an appointment and have he or she examine you thouroughly. Trying to diagnose yourself will make you crazy and may result in serious illness being missed.

Step 3 - Get an HIV Test
The most important thing you can do for yourself and your partner is to get an HIV test. And HIV test is truly the only sure way you can know whether or not you have been infected. You can get tested by your family doctor, at a free and anonymous testing site in your community, or even by purchasing a home test kit. Get tested and get the peace of mind you are looking for.

AIDS.gov blog

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