President
Barack Obama while signing a bill to extend the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program at a
White House ceremony News (Updated
November 2, 2009)
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President
Barack Obama while signing a bill to extend the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program at a
White House ceremony
The President also
announced that an order cancelling the ban will be issued on Monday and would
take effect after a 60-days waiting period.
“If we want to be a
global leader in combating H.I.V./AIDS, we need to act like it,” Obama said at
the White House while signing a bill to extend the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program.
“Now, we talk about reducing the stigma of this disease, yet we’ve treated a
visitor living with it as a threat.”
The program, started in
1990, provides medical care, medication and support services to about half a
million people, most of them low-income.
The bill is named for an
Lifting of the ban ends
the stigma
The ban came into effect in 1987 at a time of widespread fear that HIV/AIDS
could be transmitted through physical or respiratory contact.
Under the ban, all those
infected with the HIV strain were not allowed to travel or to seek a residency
in the
Because of the
restriction, the country was also prevented from hosting international
conferences on global strategies to fight HIV epidemic since 1990.
Particularly, the ban
affected tourists and gay men.
However, this announcement
has been welcomed by several groups. Now all those wanting to travel to the
"The connection
between immigration and H.I.V. has frightened people away from testing and
treatment,” said Rachel B. Tiven, executive director of Immigration Equality,
a group that advocates for gay people in immigration matters.
"Now, those families
can be reunited, and the
At the White House
ceremony, Obama also acknowledged Bush administration's efforts towards lifting
the ban, which started last year.
Last edited by Harpreet
Bhagrath on Sat, 10/31/2009 - 12
By
AIDS specialists meeting
here urged
The number of HIV
infections in
The rapid growth of the
epidemic in Russia is in contrast to sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast
Asia, where prevalence of the virus fell during the same eight-year period,
according to UNAIDS, the United Nations AIDS agency.
Russia's chief public
health officer, Gennady Onishchenko, told a regional AIDS conference Wednesday
that Russia is "emphatically against" the use of drug replacement
therapy. Meanwhile, he criticized programs that exchange clean needles for used
ones, saying such programs may promote illicit drug sales and HIV transmission.
Both are part of a
so-called harm reduction strategy, in contrast to the just-say-no programs that
urge abstinence from drugs and risky sex. Russian health officials say they are
committed overall to a "healthy lifestyles" rather than a harm
reduction approach to improving public health.
That isn't good enough, a
number of foreign experts say.
"International
studies show that an abstinence-based message on drug use or sex simply doesn't
work," said Robin Gorna, executive director of the International AIDS
Society. In
But many Russian officials
view harm reduction efforts as encouraging criminal or shameful behavior. The
position has left it increasingly isolated, as
Now those grants are being
terminated under Global Fund rules, the specialists said, because
Chris Beyrer, a professor
at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, said Russian officials "have
never really embraced" needle exchange, free condom distribution and other
harm reduction techniques.
"It is the reason I
think that they continue to have one of the most severe epidemics in the
region," said Beyrer, director of Hopkins' AIDS International Training and
Research Program. He was in
Gorna of the International
AIDS Society said the only needle exchange programs in
Russian civic groups and
other nongovernment organizations that have distributed millions of free condoms
in
Michel D. Kazatchkine,
executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, told
reporters at a news conference that he hoped the Russian government would keep
the harm reduction programs going. But Onishchenko, speaking at the same event,
did not say whether the Russian government would do so.
AIDS was virtually unknown
in
Onishchenko blamed the
increase in HIV infections to the surge in Afghan poppy production over the past
decade, a trend that has flooded the former
Russia, with a population
less than half that of the U.S., has 13 percent of the world's heroin users and
they consume about one-fifth of the drug used worldwide each year, according to
an October report by the United Nations Office on Drug Control.
Though
People living in the
region are routinely asked to provide health certificates that reveal their HIV
status, the report found. Hospital workers often casually identify HIV-positive
patients to bystanders and co-workers, U.N. researchers said, and hospitals
frequently segregate HIV-positive patients, treat them with scorn or charge them
extra, hidden fees.
HIV-positive children face
discrimination at school, including forced disclosure of their status and
segregation from other students, while in the labor sector, many employers are
wary of hiring HIV-positive individuals.
AIDS activists say that
discrimination drives many of those infected to avoid testing and treatment.
In addition to harm
reduction, Russian and foreign health experts on Wednesday debated the size of
the country's AIDS problem and the adequacy of the government's response.
While the U.N. estimates
Kazatchkine of the Global
Fund said Wednesday that only 23 percent of Russians who should be receiving
anti-retroviral therapy for HIV are getting it. He said most nations are
providing such therapy to 35 to 40 percent of those infected.
Onishchenko questioned
what he called this "strange data," saying that everyone who needs it
is getting the drug regimen, except for a small percentage of injection drug
users who walk away from the program.
"They are receiving
treatment unless they escape treatment," he asserted.
29 Oct 2009
Source: IRIN
Directly observed
treatment short course (DOTS), has been used to successfully deliver
tuberculosis treatment in some of the world's poorest countries.
The main elements of DOTS
include political commitment, case detection, standardized treatment with
supervision and patient support, an effective drug supply and management system,
and a monitoring and evaluation system.
"The key to rapid and
massive scale-up [in
Solid systems
"A standardized
system was put in place so that the same system of assessing patients for ART
eligibility, initiating treatment, and registering and reporting cases and
outcomes was followed wherever ART was being delivered - from central hospital
to health centre, and from public health facility to private clinic," the
authors said.
A study published in 2008
in the British medical journal, The Lancet, found that rapid scale-up of free
ART in rural Malawi had led to a decline in adult mortality that was detectable
at the population level.
The article's authors
attribute the success of Malawi's ART scale-up to government commitment and
leadership; clear national ART guidelines, with emphasis on the system of
registration, monitoring and recording of results; intensive training of
clinical officers and nurses in ART guidelines, with practical experience at ART
sites; an efficient drug-supply chain to prevent stock-outs.
Taking DOTS further
They note that with the
rise in prevalence - even in resource-poor sub-Saharan Africa - of
non-communicable diseases such as heart attacks, strokes, cancers, diabetes and
respiratory diseases, there is a need to put in place simple yet effective
systems to give people access to treatment.
The World Health
Organization (WHO) forecasts that deaths from non-communicable diseases are
likely to increase by 17 percent globally over the next 10 years, with the
greatest increase projected in
"Although patients
with these non-communicable diseases usually need chronic care and treatment
over their lifetimes, it is simply not provided in most resource-poor countries,
outside a few centres of excellence, and there are no systems to monitor patient
access or outcomes," they stated.
"The system put in
place in
If handled properly, HIV
and chronic disease management systems could be used to strengthen health
systems in resource-poor nations, particularly by improving laboratory
infrastructure and service delivery, monitoring, supervision, quality assurance,
and rational drug forecasting and procurement.
"Any attempt to
better the management and monitoring of special diseases must include a vision
of how the work will improve the health sector and health care delivery as a
whole," they said.
Thu Oct 29,
12:15 pm ET
The research by the
National AIDS/STD Control Programme (NASCOP) is to begin in December or next
January, the group's director Nicholas Muraguri told AFP.
"From the studies it
appears that 15 percent of the new HIV infections are attributed to gays. We can
make much noise about them but we cannot ignore them," he said.
The study will seek to
determine the latest population of gays -- currently estimated to be around
10,000 in the capital
Through anonymous
questionnaires to be distributed in selected places or by a peer network,
respondents will also be asked how many partners they have and offered voluntary
AIDS testing.
"It is the first time
in
NASCOP stressed that the
identity of people who become involved in the programme will remain
confidential.
In
Mon Oct 26, 2009
GEORGETOWN
The ninth annual general
meeting of the Pan Caribbean Partnership Against HIV/AIDS (PANCAP) is to be held
on the
The Guyana-based PANCAP
unit of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) headquarters said the region recorded
17,000 new infections last year compared to 20,000 the previous year.
PANCAP also said there
were 11,000 deaths compared to 14,000 during the same period in 2008.
"The figures are
still very high for such a small region," said PANCAP director Carl Browne,
comparing the Caribbean on a per capita basis to sub-Saharan
Latest statistics show
that 230,000 people in the Caribbean and 22 million in
Authorities say the
decline in new infections is due to massive public education and increased
condom-use, while the reduced number of deaths is a result of better access to
care and treatment.
The estimated 150
participants at the PANCAP general meeting are the discuss the latest
advancements in developing an HIV vaccine that has shown a 31 percent rate of
success.
They will also examine the
impact of HIV and AIDS on the
Mon Oct 26, 12:45 PM
BRUSSELS
In a document on
combatting AIDS more than a quarter century after it surfaced, the EU's
executive arm said now was not the time for
And while efficient
treatments exist to slow the evolution of the human immunodeficiency virus
(HIV), no vaccine or cure has been found.
"We need to continue
the political momentum in the fight against HIV/AIDS," EU Health
Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou said in a statement.
"We need to encourage
people to take responsibility for themselves and their partners by talking about
and practicing safe sex and going for HIV testing," she said.
According to commission
figures, the number of people living with HIV or AIDS in the 27 EU countries and
its neighbours rose from 1.5 million in 2001 to 2.2 million in 2007, around
730,000 of whom live in the bloc.
Some 50,000 new cases of
HIV were diagnosed in the EU and its neighbours in 2007.
The percentage of adults,
ranging in age from 15 to 49, infected with HIV vary widely, from less than 0.1
percent in some countries to more than 1.0 percent in others.
In
Tue Oct 27, 2009
The woman, Sun Qiqi, was
taken into custody at the weekend in
One mother, Zhou Limei,
said her four-year-old daughter had been stabbed multiple times last week, on
the back of her left hand and on her bottom.
It was not immediately
clear if the alleged syringe contained any hazardous materials. Children were
given ultrasound examinations and HIV tests which were negative, the China Daily
said.
"Although the blood
test shows the children are HIV-negative, I hope the government gives us proper
compensation," Zhou told the paper.
The Global Times reported
that Sun had confessed, saying she had pricked the children to "tame"
them and that she was overwhelmed by the 37 three- and four-year-olds in her
charge.
One three-year-old boy had
eight needle wounds, and was allegedly punished for refusing to take a nap, the
newspaper said.
School principal Bai Yali
told the Global Times she knew nothing about the incident, and that Sun's
performance had been "good".