Hot Items
Syphilis Among Young Women on the Rise in Philadelphia
PointCare Donates Diagnostic Tests to Haitian Clinics
Uganda's AIDS success risks sliding backwards
Pioneering Pediatrician Leads Charge to Cut Infant HIV Infections
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Syphilis Among Young Women on the Rise in Philadelphia
Philadelphia Inquirer (02.25.10) - Thursday, February 25, 2010
The Philadelphia Department of Health on Wednesday issued an alert to health care providers prompted by a 360 percent increase in infectious syphilis among young women in the city last year. In 2009, 218 cases were recorded in females, including 23 among those ages 15-29. That compares to 150 cases in 2008, including five in females in their prime childbearing years - a special concern because congenitally transmitted syphilis can cause mental retardation, physical deformities, and death. Four cases of congenital syphilis were logged in Philadelphia last year. Females ages 15-40 who have had more than one sexual partner in the past year should be screened annually, the department release said.
Men who have sex with men (MSM) continue to account for the majority of Philadelphia's syphilis cases, including 69 percent of the 2009 total. The health department repeated its recommendation that sexually active MSM be screened for the infection every three to four months. Dr. William R. Short, an infectious-disease expert at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, said providers and women need to take the new screening recommendation seriously, given the risk of congenital abnormalities caused by the STD.
Posted 26/02/2010
PointCare Donates Diagnostic Tests to Haitian Clinics
PRNewswire - February 23, 2010
MARLBOROUGH, Mass., Feb. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- PointCare Technologies, pioneer inventor of a portable diagnostic system that enables effective HIV/AIDS monitoring for millions of people in remote areas of developing countries, has donated 4,000 (a month's supply) of its rapid PointCare NOW tests to Haitian clinics to ensure the resumption of critical care to HIV/AIDS patients. The test delivers two categories of diagnostic results simultaneously: CD4 absolute count and CD4%, combined with hematology profiling for HIV monitoring and as an aid in diagnosing infection and active tuberculosis. The test runs on the company's FDA-cleared, portable PointCare NOW instrument, which operates on battery power, requires no refrigeration of reagents, and enables rapid, sophisticated field testing. In order to help address the vast need for critical emergency care following the earthquake, the company also included in the donation 4,000 rapid hematology tests to be used on its PointCare NOW instrument.
"Since 2006, our PointCare NOW systems have been used successfully in Haiti to initiate and monitor anti-retroviral therapy (ART) for thousands of HIV/AIDS patients - we've had systems in 22 individual clinics, most of them in the greater Point-au-Prince area," said Michael Cohen, senior advisor to the PointCare chairman. "We're a very small company with limited resources, but when we heard from the people on the ground in Haiti that they couldn't resume patient care because supply was not getting through, we loaded up two pallets of test kits, and sent them off to our Haitian distributor, Reinbold Import & Export, who has delivered them to clinics free of charge."
Posted 26/02/2010
Uganda's AIDS success risks sliding backwards
New Vision (Kampala) - February 22, 2010
FOR more than 20 years, Uganda has been fighting the valiant fight on AIDS. Looking back, I recognise that prevalence dropped from more than 20% in 1990 to around 6.4% today. Awareness is high. Strong messages, from "AIDS kills" in 1989 to today's "get off the sexual network" are well-known. Effective preventive medicines are available to dramatically reduce transmission of HIV from a mother to her child. And antiretroviral therapy is now available for women, men, boys and girls. Yet, despite these many victories, today we are in danger of losing this fight. At the heart of any prevention effort is testing - knowing your status. Yet even today, with all the preventive services available, too many individuals in Uganda still do not know their HIV status. Couples are marrying and having children and grandchildren, and do not know their status - and as a result, the incidence of new cases of HIV infection is on the rise.
When the AIDS Information Centre started 20 years ago at Baumann House in downtown Kampala, our first clients were two young patients. They were counselled, their blood was drawn, put in marked vacutainers, packed into a cold box, and then strapped to the back of a bicycle and taken to the Nakasero Blood Bank. After two weeks, the results came back and the patients received more counselling - as well as receiving the news that they were HIV-negative. Support for these early interventions was funded by the American people, from USAID through World Learning.
Today - two decades later - we have rapid tests and can provide results quickly, but the key is that we still need people to come for testing in the first place and to make better and full use of the available facilities. The best example of beating new infections is prevention-of-mother-to-child transmission services (PMTCT), which is the drug equivalent of a vaccine to prevent an HIV-positive mother from transmitting the disease to her child.
Posted 26/02/2010
Pioneering Pediatrician Leads Charge to Cut Infant HIV Infections
Voice of America - February 4, 2010
Arthur Ammann develops cocktail to prevent mother-to-child transmission.Arthur Ammann grew up in Brooklyn, New York, the son of working class German immigrants who had never finished grade school. But his parents supported his desire to go to college and become a doctor. And when he did, Ammann went on to lead a global charge to cut the HIV infection rate among infants. While in medical school Ammann found his calling in immunology. He learned how the body responds to infection and how to develop vaccines to protect people. "Immunology was just emerging at the time I was completing my pediatric training," Ammann recalls. In 1971, he became the first pediatric immunologist at the University of California in San Francisco.
Ammann develops effective pneumonia vaccine.
In the early 1970's, he and his colleagues were the first to complete clinical trials that led to FDA approval for the pneumococcal vaccine against pneumonia. He still considers that his greatest achievement.
"The Gates foundation recently announced that they were donating $10 billion for vaccines, including a pneumococcal vaccine for children in poor countries," Amman says. "That's especially important now, as new, more dangerous flu strains emerge." "With the flu epidemic, people don't always die of the flu, the virus," he says. "They die of bacterial infection which is the pneumococcal infection. It's very important in this influenza epidemic to get the pneumococcal immunization to prevent pneumonia."
Posted 26/02/2010
