Speaking to journalists in Tokyo, he said: "SARS is caused by another virus (different from HIV) and it does not kill lots of people -- around 4 to 5 percent of those infected. But if the immune system is depressed by AIDS, the toll would be much higher. ? It would be very alarming if people would be infected with both SARS and AIDS."

Montagnier, a French biologist, is a co-discoverer of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, has spread to dozens of countries around the world in recent months, with Asian countries being the hardest hit. Nearly 90 percent of all cases are confined to Hong Kong and mainland China, where the capital city of Beijing shut down all primary and secondary schools until at least May 7.

According to the World Health Organization's statistics as of Wednesday, there have been 4,288 reported cases since November. Cases in the United States total 39, with no reported deaths.

Even though no effective drug treatment for SARS exists, Montagnier was not alarmed about the development of the epidemic, arguing that there are many tools available for tracking and controlling its spread.

"An epidemic where 95 percent of the people survive hasn't got much chance of going very far." He added: "Many more people die from flu every year."

The SARS outbreak is a stark reminder that for all our worry about terrorists unleashing man-made germs, nature's own weapons factory is the biggest threat of all. A few decades ago the medical establishment naively figured that it could conquer infection with modern antibiotics and vaccines. Fat chance. Microbes are constantly mutating and evolving into new and deadly forms. Every few decades nature concocts a major new killer. HIV was one of the last big ones. Only time will tell whether SARS is anywhere near as threatening, but no one is ruling out the terrifying possibility.

SARS is so new that almost everything about it remains shrouded in uncertainty. The disease starts with an achy fever that won't go away, followed after a few days by a dry cough, pneumonia and shortness of breath. About 90% of people recover on their own. But in about 10% of cases, lung inflammation becomes so severe that a respirator is needed for breathing. About a third of these patients die from massive respiratory failure.

The biggest unknown is how far and how fast it will spread. There are three basic possibilities. The worst-case scenario is that the virus spreads like wildfire to more and more countries until it becomes a full-blown global epidemic, or pandemic. The SARS virus doesn't appear to spread as fast as influenza. If it did, we'd have hundreds of thousands of cases by now. Still, a killer bug that merely spreads as fast as a cold is horrifying enough. The best-case scenario is that the vigorous efforts to contain the virus succeed and it quickly burns itself out in a few weeks or months.

The optimistic outcome, though, is unlikely. It is next to impossible to eliminate a disease without a vaccine. That's why tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria are still scourges of mankind.

The most likely result is somewhere between these two extremes: The disease stops short of global pandemic but remains a smoldering threat--perhaps in rural China, perhaps in Africa, perhaps throughout the globe--until we are able to finally develop a cheap and effective vaccine, much like the ones for measles and the flu. But that could easily take eight to ten years.

The prime suspect behind the disease is a new type of coronavirus that comes from a well-known family of viruses responsible for up to 30% of cases of the common cold, as well as various animal diseases. This strain appears to have genetic similarities to human, cow and bird coronaviruses, according to gene chip studies done at the University of California, San Francisco. (Recently researchers at the British Columbia Cancer Agency's Genome Sciences center said that they had determined the complete gene sequence of the suspect SARS virus.)

Coronaviruses are particularly good at grabbing and blending genetic material from other species, says University of Southern California coronavirus researcher Michael Lai. "We've always said [such a virulent strain] was a possibility, but I never thought it would happen in my lifetime," he says.

Another possibility: All SARS cases, or all the life-threatening cases, represent a dual infection with coronavirus and something else, such as a novel metapneumovirus. Metapneumovirus has been found in some victims.

One mystery is how the virus is transmitted. The weight of the evidence so far suggests that it spreads in a way similar to colds, either through the coughing up of large droplets or through direct contact with patients or objects the patient just touched and contaminated. Less likely but much more alarming is the possibility that the virus, like a fine aerosol mist, lingers in the air long after a sick person has coughed and gone. Influenza and tuberculosis are spread this way, making it next to impossible to stop the chain of transmission.

Peter Jahrling, a virologist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, has just begun testing isolated bits of the coronavirus against 2,000 approved drug compounds to see if any of them kill or disrupt the virus. "We're going to be cranking these out at several hundred a day," he says. One of his first tests is to determine if the broad-spectrum antiviral ribavirin, now used for viral hepatitis, is useful. Separately, ViroPharma of Exton, Pennsylvania, says it plans to screen its entire 400,000-compound collection against the new coronavirus.

Dr. Fauci of the U.S. infectious-diseases institute has already convened a crash project to craft a dead version of the corona-virus that would stimulate an immune response. But, he says, "no matter how much I turn on the afterburners, I won't have a vaccine ready for next winter."

The non-profit organization then filed a lawsuit claiming that one of GlaxoSmithKline's predecessor companies falsely obtained patents on the HIV drug AZT, which was created by the National Institutes of Health in 1964 as a possible cancer treatment.

That suit asked that the company's patents on AZT, as well as related HIV drugs Combivir (lamivudine, zidovudine) and Trizivir (zidovudine, lamivudine, abacavir), be invalidated.

The litigation, however, was dismissed in March. GlaxoSmithKline said that the court determined that AHF's suit attempted to re-open issues already settled in the 1990s, when a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that company researchers did invent the use of AZT as an anti-HIV agent.

AHF said on Monday that it has refiled its suit, removing claims related to the Bayh-Dole Act -- legislation passed in 1980 that allows businesses and universities to acquire control over government-funded inventions to facilitate commercialization.

AHF General Counsel Tom Myers told Reuters Health that although the court did not give the organization any clarity on why it accepted GlaxoSmithKline's request for dismissal, AHF's lawyers decided to drop the Bayh-Dole Act-related claims because the legislation does not give private parties the right to litigate over violations of the act.

The new suit, said AHF, focuses on the drugs' patents themselves and GlaxoSmithKline's alleged monopolization over the market for HIV/AIDS medicines. Myers noted that the amended lawsuit also adds new information designed to strengthen AHF's position.

GlaxoSmithKline has maintained that AHF's complaints are without merit.

As head of a Christian ministry at work in 92 countries, Stearns is on a 15-city tour to stir concern for what he called "the greatest humanitarian crisis of all time."

Tuesday morning, he met with an eclectic group of leaders that included Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, evangelist Leighton Ford and Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory.

Later, he urged 700 students at Charlotte Latin School to kick-start their activism by talking about HIV/AIDS with their folks over dinner. Today, Stearns meets with 25 Charlotte-area pastors to try to reverse what he calls the faith community's "relative apathy" despite HIV/AIDS having claimed 25 million lives.

The 7:15 a.m. breakfast at The Park Hotel is invitation-only, but clergy inspired to come without an invitation are welcome, organizers said.

Before his breakfast talk to leaders, Stearns admitted that HIV/AIDS is a "radioactive issue" among Christians whose disdain for homosexuality keeps them from helping. He admitted to the group that the Hollywood and gay communities -- along with Elizabeth Taylor, rock star Bono and the U.S. government -- are doing more than anyone else to fight the disease.

But along with evangelist Franklin Graham's Samaritan's Purse, World Vision is challenging people to obey the command to love their neighbor -- and to start with the 40 million now living with the killer virus.

World Vision's Hope Initiative includes plans for a Washington summit, a Christian concert tour and public service announcements featuring opera star Jessye Norman, "Jeopardy" host Alex Trebek and former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop. The organization, based in suburban Seattle, is also asking Americans to lobby Congress to support President Bush's call for $15 billion in HIV/AIDS funding.

At Charlotte Latin, Stearns showed a video of an African mother and her two children, all dying of AIDS. The mother's wish? That her children die first, because if she's not there to care for him, they will die alone.

"It's going to be your generation that will have to deal with this issue," Stearns warned the students, urging them to join this "One Life Revolution" by delivering medicine to the sick and supporting needy families.

At the breakfast meeting at Queens, attendees were handed pledge cards seeking spiritual and financial support for up to $10,000. With the cards came a challenge from evangelist Ford, a World Vision board member:

Rather than just being known as a city of big houses and big banks, let Charlotte be known as a city of great compassion.

"Do I hear an amen, Mr. Mayor?" Ford asked McCrory, seated at the back of the room.

"Amen," McCrory answered.

Anderson Fumulani,Inter Press Service

LILONGWE, 23 Apr (IPS) - HIV/AIDS infection rates appear to be on the decline in Malawi and authorities have attributed the drop to the declining number of AIDS related deaths of already infected people.

The national prevalence rate in 1999 indicated that 16 percent of the country's 11.2 million population were infected but these estimates have now leveled off to below 15 percent in 2000 and 2001 according to latest information by the National Aids Commission (NAC) released in March 2003.

These estimates fall below the trend and analysts say the reason is not definitive but is probably related to some yet to be explained random fluctuations.

"It could also be because prevalence is starting to decline due to a high death rate among older adults. Although some decline in prevalence is noted among 15-19 and 20-24 year-olds in Lilongwe, there is no similar decline in Blantyre or elsewhere," says a joint review report of NAC HIV/AIDS Strategy.

In Malawi HIV/AIDS reportedly kills 81,000 people each year adding an overload of 65,000 orphaned children to an already staggering 500,000 orphans countrywide. Over 845,000 Malawians are estimated to be living with the HIV virus countrywide 65,000 of them children, according to the report. It also says more women than men are infected accounting for between 12 percent and 18 percent of those infected as opposed to between 5 - 8 percent for men of the same age group.

"The primary mode of HIV transmission in Malawi remains through unprotected heterosexual sex [accounting for 90 percent of those infected] with more women [representing 56 percent] infected than men. This suggests that women are more at risk and are being infected by older men," says the report.

If the declining infection rates are gains at all, abject poverty on the other hand is significantly eating away those gains and contributes to a faster manifestation of full blown AIDS to those infected because of lack of adequate food and high malnutrition.

A recent United Nations report said the number of Tuberculosis (TB) cases in Malawi increased dramatically between January and June 2002 by about 26 percent "clearly indicating the devastating impact of hunger in accelerating fragile HIV conditions into symptoms associated with full blown AIDS."

In 2000, the United Nations Development Program ranked Malawi at number 163 of the 173 poorest countries of the world, both in terms of quality of life and income poverty. Over six million people in the country live below one United States dollar per day with Gross Domestic Product of about U.S.$170 in 2000, according to the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper.

The food crisis that has hit Southern Africa now threatens 3.6 million people in Malawi in need of food aid but the situation significantly poses a more serious danger to those living with the HIV virus.

"Despite the fact that the [humanitarian] crisis is due to a variety of factors (including erratic weather, seven-fold rise in the price of maize and weak governance), it is clear that HIV/AIDS is an underlying and exacerbating factor, and that its impact is harshest among individuals and households battling HIV/AIDS.

"To date, an estimated 5.8 percent of the Malawi farm labor force has died due to AIDS, and a substantially higher number are challenged and impeded in their everyday lives to work their farms on account of HIV/AIDS related complications," the report notes.

Linking food shortages to the AIDS crisis, special envoy for the U.N. Secretary General for Humanitarian Needs in Southern Africa, Stephen Lewis, said when he visited Malawi recently that the drought may end but the crisis would not.

"The distinguishing factor this time being that HIV/AIDS remains the underlying determinant to the perpetuation of the crisis in Southern Africa and that, combined with cyclical food shortages and chronic poverty, the epidemic becomes even more deadly," he noted.

The government of Malawi spends nearly $123,500 outside operating budget to finance funeral expenses of dying civil servants every year, a government commissioned report said recently.

Justin Malewezi, Vice President of Malawi said at the launch of the report that the financial implications of HIV/AIDS through training and recruitment, funerals, death benefits, and absenteeism was very high and was pushing the government outside its operating budget.

"Everyday we're burying our workmates, our teachers, doctors, and other professionals. HIV and Aids erodes human capital as professionals die making the public and private sector less efficient through lack of capacity," Malewezi said.

The report sampled out five of the 42 government ministries of Water Development, Agriculture and Irrigation, Education, Science and Technology, Health and Population, and the Malawi Police Service (MPS).

Among the government ministries, hardest hit is the ministry of Education, Science and Technology that loses on average up to 58 percent of its employees singling out secondary school teachers standing at 77 percent of those who die from the pandemic out of the estimated 50,000 teaching workforce.

"High vacancy rates and increased absenteeism result in more workload pressures on available staff and this leads to added stress and burnout which negatively affect staff morale," part of the government commissioned report says.

The virus that causes Aids, according to UNAIDS, has mostly hit Sub-Saharan Africa region with 67 percent of the world's total population of people living with HIV/AIDS representing 21 million men, women and children.

Although over 845,000 live with the HIV virus in Malawi, only 25,000 people are expected to be able to access the Anti-Retroviral Viral (ARV) drugs through the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria, according to Wesley Sangala, Chief Technical Advisor for the Health Ministry. The Fund has granted $208 million to the Government of Malawi.

ARV drugs that prolong the lives of HIV/AIDS sufferers can only be accessed in Malawi at a subsidized price of $28 per month, a cost far beyond the reach of the majority of those poor suffers.

Christopher Lisotta, Gay.com / PlanetOut.com Network

SUMMARY: The Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved the creation of an AIDS victims memorial in a park, despite neighborhood opposition.

The Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved the creation of an AIDS victims memorial in a park, despite neighborhood opposition.

In a 10-0 vote, the council approved on Tuesday the $505,000 memorial, which will be funded by state, city and private donations, for the northeast Los Angeles neighborhood of Lincoln Heights. The 9,000-square-foot memorial, named "The Wall -- Las Memorias," will be shaped in the likeness of the Aztec god of hope, Quetzalcoatl, a feathered serpent, and consist of eight panels.

Two panels will bear the names of 2,000 people who have died from complications of AIDS, while the other six panels will bear murals depicting life with AIDS, designed by local Los Angeles artists. Memorial designers hope it will serve as an educational tool to spur discussion in the Latino community about HIV and AIDS. An open-air amphitheater will be located near the end of the memorial to host community discussions and educational seminars. The plan also calls for sculpture, benches, a walking path and a rose garden.

The City Council vote marked the end of a sometimes acrimonious debate between memorial supporters and neighborhood residents, who argued they were not consulted enough about the design and even the location of the memorial. Critics said in a series of community meetings the area is so short on public space it has no room for any kind of monuments, while others countered that diseases like diabetes would be a better choice for a memorial than AIDS.

Supporters countered that the real reasons some people were wary of the memorial were homophobia and fear over discussing a subject like AIDS so publicly within the Latino community, and broadcasting to the public at large that AIDS is a problem.

Earlier this month Richard Zaldivar, who first envisioned the memorial 10 years ago, asked the city's Human Relations Commission to mediate the dispute.

Zaldivar asked for the commission to intercede after a private group of residents began handing out fliers in front of a nearby Catholic Church that said, "Latino gay men have been covertly trying to make a monument to themselves."

With a big turnout from both sides of the issue at the council meeting, the final vote got emotional as well. The Los Angeles Times reported that immediately after the vote Councilman Nate Holden told opponents, "(AIDS) won't go away. It is what it is."

Construction is expected to begin in May and be completed by June.

By Randy Dotinga
HealthScoutNews Reporter

WEDNESDAY, April 23 (HealthScoutNews) -- Prospects for an AIDS cure loom so far in the future, many scientists won't hazard a prediction.

And an effective vaccine is a distant dream, too.

But there has been a breakthrough that offers new hope for patients: a newly approved drug called Fuzeon that can serve as an alternative therapy for those who have become immune to the most powerful medications.

"This is a huge advance for patients," says Dr. Robert L. Murphy, an AIDS expert and professor of infectious diseases at Northwestern University. "It's a very good drug. It will work no matter how resistant patients are to the other drugs."

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Fuzeon -- also known as enfuvirtide, or T-20 -- in mid-March after an extraordinarily quick review. Its manufacturers, Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. and Trimeris Inc., hope to get the drug to pharmacy shelves by April, which is also National STD Awareness Month.

As many as 30 percent of patients who take AIDS drugs may benefit from Fuzeon because their current therapy is no longer effective, Murphy says.

Thanks to powerful medications, AIDS has become a much more manageable health threat than it was just a decade ago, at least in Western countries where drugs are affordable and available. In the United States, the estimated annual number of AIDS-related deaths fell from more than 50,000 in 1995 to fewer than 9,000 in 2001, according to federal health statistics.

However, doctors fear the growing trend of resistance to those medications could drive the death toll higher once again.

"The current drugs are working quite well. Patients are going back to work, living longer, and the quality of their life is immensely improved. But we have to realize there's an increasing amount of drug resistance emerging," says Dr. Warner C. Greene, director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology at the University of California at San Francisco.

The problem is that the AIDS virus, like many germs, can change its form to thwart the killing powers of drugs. Researchers suspect the process accelerates, at least in some cases, when patients forget to take their AIDS medications at specific times.

Drug resistance is a fact of life in the AIDS world, says Dr. Robert Grant, an investigator with the Gladstone Institute.

"There are people in the drug development field who say that if a compound doesn't produce drug resistance, it shouldn't be developed further. It means it's not really inhibiting HIV," Grant says.

Fuzeon, which experts say is the first major advance in AIDS drug treatment since the mid-1990s, attacks HIV -- the virus that causes AIDS -- in an entirely new way. And that makes it a valuable alternative to the existing drugs whose power is diminishing, Murphy says.

Unlike all other AIDS drugs on the market, which try to disable the virus after it has attacked cells, Fuzeon prevents infection in the first place. That's why it's called an "entry-blocker" or "fusion inhibitor" -- it stops the virus from entering or fusing with cells.

But Fuzeon won't be available to every person who needs it, especially those living in poorer nations.

"The real barrier is its production," says Michael Allerton, HIV policy operations director with the Kaiser Permanente Health Plan of Northern California. "It's extremely hard to produce, and that makes the quantity limited and the price extremely high."

Treatment with Fuzeon is estimated to cost about $20,000 a year, and patients will have to take it with other AIDS drugs.

And unlike other AIDS medications, Fuzeon does not come in pills. Patients must inject it.

Murphy says he doesn't expect drug resistance to pose a problem for patients who take Fuzeon, at least for a while, because manufacturers are developing similar medications to supplement it.

And while Fuzeon -- like other AIDS drugs -- can keep the HIV virus at bay, it cannot drive it from the body.

"We are doing much better than we were in terms of chronically controlling the infection, treating it more like diabetes instead of cancer," Greene says. "But I don't think we're close to a cure. This virus is too devious."

An AIDS vaccine, which would prevent people from getting the disease in the first place, also appears unlikely any time soon. However, experts say a vaccine is much closer than a cure, and several vaccines are in various stages of testing.

In February, researchers released the results of the most extensive study to date of an AIDS vaccine. It found the vaccine failed to prevent the disease except among a small sample of blacks and Asians. Critics, who doubt the vaccine works at all, suspect the findings are meaningless.

One AIDS expert isn't holding his breath over the prospects for a vaccine.

"To say it's five years off would be optimistic, even if everything goes well with the vaccines we're testing today," says Dr. Mark Feinberg, an AIDS vaccine researcher and professor of medicine at Emory University in Atlanta.

FRANK TALK: 'The only sure way to avoid AIDS is abstinence. Short of that, there are risks,' Marta Pallidine, a teacher at McMillan Middle School, tells her students in a discussion of HIV and AIDS. PATRICK FARRELL/HERALD STAFF

By Nigel Glass

VIENNA (Reuters Health) - A Swiss advertising campaign to combat HIV/AIDS has been cut back to avoid offence to the country's Catholic bishops -- religious leaders to 3.3 million of the country's 7.3 million people.

Two advertisements urging the use of condoms have been withdrawn from the initiative, which aimed to curb the 25-percent increase in HIV infections seen in Switzerland last year.

A poster in German says: "Dear Father, if Rome doesn't want you to talk about contraception, then talk about condoms instead."

"We are not against the campaign, but we do not want it to upset Catholic sensibilities," Marc Aellan, deputy general secretary of the Swiss Bishops' Conference, told Reuters Health.

He said that while the Swiss Catholic Church was completely behind the campaign in principle, "it did not like a number of the campaign's messages, and these two were particularly offensive."

But Swiss health ministry spokeswoman, Sandra Meier, denied that the campaign had been dropped because it offended Catholic sensibilities, but rather because it was inaccurate in its use of wording.

"We had intensive talks with the Bishop's conference, and agreed to drop that part of the campaign because we had used the word Rome rather than Vatican. The Pope is in Rome, but he lives in the Vatican, which is a separate state," she told Reuters Health.

"We realized that the campaign would provoke a reaction. It was never our intention to attack Rome, the Vatican or the Church, or to hurt religious feelings."

Juerg Schaub, who is at the advertising agency CRDDB and designed the posters, said one of the main goals of the campaign was to get people talking about AIDS once again, and if that was done through controversy, then so be it.

It is not the first controversial Swiss campaign against HIV/AIDS. In the early 1990s, an advertisement promoting the use of condoms featured gay men playing in the countryside, and a later effort showed a penis tied in a knot.

Aellan said that his church does not entirely condemn the use of condoms in protecting against HIV/AIDS. "We say that the best protection is fidelity, but for those who cannot follow this, condoms are the better of the two wrongs," he said.

Jeffrey Allen,OneWorld U.S.

Washington DC, Apr. 23 (OneWorld) - AIDS activists chanted, sang, rallied, and deposited 600 pairs of shoes in front of the South African embassy here today--one for each person that dies from the disease every day in that country--as part of a global demonstration to demand greater access to medication for people living with HIV and AIDS.

Chanting "medication for every nation" and "AIDS can be defeated, if the people are treated," some 300 activists from Washington, New York, and Philadelphia presented a memo to the South African government's representative in the U.S., Professor Thandabantu Nhlapo, demanding immediate action to provide AIDS treatment for all of the country's HIV-positive citizens.

"We as Americans...have come today to the front of the South African embassy to insist that any barrier--whether it's the greed of a pharmaceutical company, or the indifference of the U.S. government, or the obstruction of the South African government--we will stand against and we will overturn, until AIDS becomes a treatable disease in poor countries just as it is for rich people in rich countries," said Asia Russell of the Philadelphia-based activist group Health GAP.

Every day the disease kills 8,500 people worldwide, Russell noted, with the greatest burden falling on the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. South Africa alone has 4.6 million HIV-positive citizens, the most of any country in the world.

The South African government has come under fire for its controversial stance on AIDS--initially disareeing with the widely-accepted scientific belief that HIV causes AIDS, then ultimately accepting the science last year but dragging its feet on the creation of a universal treatment program for its citizens, according to advocacy groups like Health GAP, Africa Action, and the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), South Africa's largest grassroots AIDS activist organization.

Thursday's demonstrations, including actions in Los Angeles, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Milan, Tokyo, and Nairobi, were planned to coincide with this weekend's celebration of Freedom Day in South Africa and to show solidarity with the TAC's campaign of civil disobedience to force the South African government to take action on the issue, which began last month.

Many of the organizations represented at the Washington rally supported the South African government in a 2001 lawsuit demanding that pharmaceutical companies provide access to cheaper, generic AIDS drugs for poor countries, explained Africa Action Executive Director Salih Booker, expressing dismay at now having to critique that same government for failing to deliver on its promise of health care for all its citizens.

Accepting the memorandum on behalf of the South African government, Nhlapo pleaded with the activists not to look upon his government as an adversary, but rather as an ally in the fight against AIDS.

"With limited resources, our government's budget allocation for HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases has been increased ten times since the 2001-2002 financial year. Indeed, South Africa's plan to combat HIV and AIDS has been recognized by the United Nations as the largest and most comprehensive in Africa, and one of the largest in the world," said Nhlapo, to equal parts boos and applause.

"This is not a fight that sets us against each other, it is one that we are joined together in prosecuting and as long as this scourge persists, so also should efforts to stand together in combating it" he added.

But Health GAP's Russell was not convinced. "The facts are in on the country of South Africa," she replied. "The financial analysis has been done. What's missing is a commitment from the government, deputy Ambassador. What's missing is an incontrovertible commitment: 'Yes, we will roll out antiretroviral treatment for the public sector.'"