Worldwide the HIV pandemic grew by millions this year, driven by new infections in people aged 10 to 24 years. In that group, five people were infected every minute in 1998, says a UN report. The HIV epidemic continues to expand at a staggering pace, particularly among teenagers and post-adolescent adults in the poorer
Baltimore - With a rising sense of urgency about the limits of current anti-HIV medications, scientists are trying seemingly drastic treatments - with surprisingly good results. Patients taking a combination of antiviral drugs received powerful immune-system stimulators, agents that make them quite sick but that drive
GENEVA: `IT S HARD TO TELL if the glass is half full or half empty, Ilana Fogelman said, shrugging her shoulders. She was speaking of her Food and Drug Administration research on the immune responses of AIDS patients who have been taking the powerful triple-drug combination therapy called HAART. Pointing to her
Geneva - In a worrisome reversal of generally held beliefs about AIDS prevention, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that lowering the rates of common sexually transmitted diseases in a community does not guarantee a decline in HIV incidence. The finding, based on CDC efforts in
Geneva - An Australian researcher believes that protease inhibitor drugs attack two key proteins in the body, causing the bizarre lipid disorders suffered by some people who take the drugs to combat their HIV infections. Dr. David Cooper of St. Vincent s Hospital in Sydney finds that more than half of his 3,000 HIV pat
Geneva - Researchers have uncovered unusual behaviors of human immune systems that seem to have protected certain babies in Canada , prostitutes in Thailand and Africa, and gay men in San Francisco from HIV, despite exposure to the AIDS virus. The protections do not appear to be genetic, and may offer some critical
Geneva - Plans to use a new vaccine approach to try to restimulate the immune system to attack latent HIV were detailed by Dr. David Ho yesterday at this week s 12th World Conference of AIDS. Ho s decision to conduct the vaccine experiment comes in the wake of dismal news and real dangers involved with the standard tre
Geneva - It will take at least 10 years of intense combination drug therapy to kill off all the HIV in an infected person s body, Dr. David Ho predicted yesterday at the 12th World Conference on AIDS. But a sizable percentage of HIV patients will never get close, he and other experts said. That obviously is difficult t
The HIV pandemic is expanding dramatically in most poor countries even as it plateaus or declines in the United States and other wealthy nations, the United Nations AIDS program announced yesterday. Releasing the first country-by-country analysis ever compiled for the disease, UNAIDS des
There has been a striking increase in the number of Americans in their teens and early 20s infected heterosexually with HIV, even as levels of the disease are declining among those in their late 20s and older. Researchers from the National Cancer Institute report in today s Journal of the American Medical Asso
Dr. Neal Nathanson is taking the helm of the national Office of AIDS Research with one key theme to his battle plan: Get a vaccine. With HIV treatments proving toxic to many Americans and unaffordable to others around the globe, President Bill Clinton in May, 1997, ordered the National Institutes of Health to have a va
HIV vaccine development is years from fruition. And industry experts say it will be at least eight years before a new class of drugs will be available to treat the world s swelling population of HIV patients. So new strategies of prevention and research must be developed, experts say. Globally, few of the tens of milli
The current optimism over HIV treatment, which relies on a combination of drugs to hold the virus in abeyance, may be doomed, according to an analysis released last night by the former director of all federally funded AIDS research in the United States . While protease inhibitors , combined
Declaring that studies in Thailand show that a short course of AZT therapy in pregnant women can reduce their chances of giving birth to HIV-infected babies by 50 percent, the World Health Organization stopped all further use yesterday of placebos in related drug trials
Chicago - A generic, unpatented drug, added to the cocktail of medicines for HIV infection, may dramatically reduce the amount of virus in the body, researchers say. At least three patients who took hydroxyurea and stopped drug therapy have shown no rebound of HIV. Details of six clinical experiments using hydroxyurea
Chicago - Researchers have discovered and genetically analyzed the oldest confirmed strain of HIV ever found, in blood taken in Africa in 1959. The finding, scientists said, not only dates the emergence of the AIDS virus, but genetically appears to be the mother strain, the ancestor of the most common forms of HIV-1 se
This information is designed to support, not replace, the relationship that exists between you and your doctor.