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02.24.2016

a ring to prevent HIV

HIV Prevention Ring

A monthly vaginal ring can prevent HIV transmission in women.

Bob Roehr at Scientific American reports on how the insertion of a vaginal ring can prevent HIV transmission in women. From the article:

Women use a silicone elastomer vaginal matrix ring that dispenses an anti-HIV drug—similar to ones used to dispense birth control hormones—and are protected from HIV infection for a month.

According to researchers who tested the ring on more than 4,500 African women between the ages of 18 and 45, the concept works. Women who used the ring were 27 percent less likely to become infected with the HIV virus, according to data presented last Monday at the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston.

The ring must remain inserted the entire month for the treatment to work most effectively. Researchers are currently working on ways of improving the ring to make it easier for women to adhere to the treatment.

“We need to figure out what women really want,” says Carl Dieffenbach, director of the Division of AIDS, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who oversees more than a billion dollars of National Institutes of Health–funded AIDS research and was not involved with the study. “This is just a step along the way. Do we do better if we offer women protection from pregnancy as well as protection from HIV?” The next studies might have both birth control and antiviral properties or perhaps just contraception instead of a placebo.

07.11.2014

child actually not HIV free

HIV medications

A child thought to be cured of HIV is actually still infected. The child received aggressive treatment immediately after birth, which made the virus undetectable. Now the child is showing signs of viral infection again, after two years without therapy. From the Bloomberg:

The child, born to an HIV-infected mother, is now nearly four years old. It was found to have detectable HIV levels in its blood during a routine clinical care visit earlier this month, according to a statement by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Doctors had unintentionally stopped giving anti-retroviral treatments to the child at 18 months. When care resumed five months later, medical staff couldn’t detect the virus and the speculation was that the child was free of the illness.

“Obviously, as an individual patient it’s disappointing,” said Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, in a telephone interview. “But we’re learning very important things. Our capability of detection isn’t good enough. This reservoir is extraordinary, and we need to get better tools to measure it accurately.”

03.06.2014

another baby cured of HIV?

Back in March of last year, it was announced that a baby had been cured from HIV, thanks to early and aggressive antiretroviral treatements. Now, we have a second case of it happening.

From Popular Science:

…[A] Los Angeles-born child infected through its mother was treated with the drugs four hours after its birth, last April. Now, with the child approaching its first birthday, the virus appears to have gone into remission.

The HIV medication used in both cases is usually part of a treatment to suppress the virus in infected patients, but the illness, in those other cases, comes back after the patient is taken off the drugs

The patient is still taking medications so they cannot say with any certainty that the drug has cured him. But the virus seems to be operating at depressed levels and the clinicians are optimistic that it is in recession.

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