LONDON
(Reuters) - The number of men paying for sex doubled during the last decade and
they were more likely to have had a sexually transmitted infection (STI),
according to a study published on Thursday.News (Updated December 3, 2005)
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01 Dec 2005 17:15:02 GMT
Source: Reuters |
Following are some key facts and figures about the disease on World AIDS Day:
* About 3.1 million people died in 2005; 570,000 of them were children. This is almost 1 million more deaths than in 2003, with 5 million new infections in 2005.
* Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, has killed more than 25 million people since it was first recognized in 1981.
* Sub-Saharan Africa has 10 percent of the world's population, but more than 60 percent of all people infected with HIV.
* An estimated 2.4 million people died of HIV-related illnesses in 2005 in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 3.2 million became infected with HIV.
* In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the number of HIV infections has risen by one quarter to 1.6 million since 2003, and the number of AIDS deaths almost doubled to 62,000.
* In Asia, 8.3 million people had HIV in 2005, including 1.1 million newly infected, and 520,000 AIDS patients died.
* An estimated 3.7 million people are infected with HIV in the Americas and Western and Central Europe.
* The AIDS virus is transmitted through sex, shared needles, and from mother to child during birth and breast-feeding.
* Cocktails of drugs known as highly active anti-retroviral therapy, also ARVs or HAART, can keep HIV-infected patients healthy and prevent the development of AIDS. About 20 such drugs are on the market, including cheap, generic copies.
* Experts agree that a vaccine offers the best hope for stopping AIDS. Currently, more than 30 potential AIDS vaccines are being tested in people in 19 countries but none has shown any special promise.
* Condoms can help prevent the spread of AIDS and activists are clamoring for the development of a gel or cream called a microbicide that could be used to prevent sexual transmission of the virus.
Sources: www.unaids.org, Kaiser Family Foundation, International AIDS Vaccine
Initiative
Thu Dec 1, 2005 5:12 AM GMT
By Michael Holden
LONDON
(Reuters) - The number of men paying for sex doubled during the last decade and
they were more likely to have had a sexually transmitted infection (STI),
according to a study published on Thursday.
The increase may be due to the rise in divorce rates and in the number of men who have never married, it says.
It found that men who paid for sex were likely to have had more sexual partners, many of them overseas including in countries with higher rates of HIV and other STIs.
The study, by researchers at Imperial College London, based its findings on surveys of 11,000 British adults carried out in 1990 and 2000.
In 1990, 5.6 percent of men said they had paid for sex at some stage during their lifetime, with 2 percent saying they had done so in the previous five years and 0.5 percent in the last year.
Ten years later, the figures had doubled with 9 percent of men admitting they had had "commercial sex", with 4.2 percent paying for sex in the last five years and 1.3 percent saying they had done so in the last year.
The study, published in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections, said that based on the 2000 results, men aged 25-34, living in London and who had never married or were divorced, were the most likely to have paid for sex.
More than a third of them had 10 or more sexual partners during the previous five years and over a half had had new sexual partners while abroad.
"The rate of divorce has increased, as has the proportion of men who are never or previously married, and this may explain some of the increased 'demand' for commercial sex," the researchers said.
"All reports suggest an increasingly large and diverse sex industry, with more opportunities for the sale and purchase of sex via clubs, escort agencies, the Internet, and sex tourism."
Britain has seen a significant rise in STIs, with chlamydia up 103 percent and gonorrhoea cases up 97 percent between 1997 and 2002, along with a rise in new HIV infections.
Almost one in 10 men who paid for sex had had an STI but the study said it was not clear if this higher incidence was through commercial sex or because they had had more partners.
However, the report called for education and media campaigns to target such men as, despite their increased risk, fewer than one in five had visited a sexual health clinic and only one in seven had been tested for HIV.
It said more research was needed and particular attention should be given to single and divorced men and tourists.
"While men generally do not discuss commercial sexual contacts with each other, there are situations where this does occur including holidays and "stag (bachelor) party" trips where commercial sex may be a collective experience," it said.
Wed Nov 30, 2005 8:12 PM ET
By Allyn Fisher-Ilan
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A scientist who helped to discover the HIV virus said he has made progress toward producing an AIDS vaccine and hopes to launch a clinical trial in about a year.
Dr. Robert Gallo, the director of the University of Maryland's Institute for Human Virology, said results from animal studies were encouraging.
"I think we've made some advances in making antibodies that will react with the variety of strains of HIV," he told Reuters, referring to the virus that causes AIDS.
Scientists believe a vaccine is the best hope for ending the global AIDS pandemic that has killed about 3.1 million people this year. But defeating the virus has proved more difficult than researchers had expected.
Gallo, in Israel to accept an award from Bar-Ilan University in advance of World AIDS day on Thursday, said it was still too early to say when a vaccine could be produced for humans.
Researchers believe an effective AIDS vaccine is still many years away.
"We have had some interesting results in the monkeys that show we can make an immune response,", Gallo said, noting potential progress on overcoming the problem of mutation of the virus.
But the antibodies produced in his experiments lasted only up to four months, which is far less than needed for an effective vaccine.
"We are making progress with a preventive vaccine, but we are not there yet," added Gallo, who discovered the AIDS virus with France's Luc Montagnier.
Earlier this week Europe's biggest drug maker GlaxoSmithKline Plc announced a plan to develop an experimental AIDS vaccine along with France's Institut Pasteur.
They intend to make the vaccine by fusing genes from HIV on to an existing vaccine for measles.
More than 30 AIDS vaccine trials in humans are ongoing but no one can predict if any will be effective against the virus that has infected nearly 5 million people in 2005.
Antiretroviral drugs have prolonged lives of people with HIV/AIDS but public health experts say preventing the spread of virus, by using condoms, abstinence and needle exchange programs, is also essential for halting the epidemic.
The number of people living with HIV/AIDS hit a record high of 40.3 million this year, according to the latest figures from the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization.
Mon Nov 28, 2005 1:57 PM GMT
By Ben Hirschler, European Pharmaceuticals Correspondent
LONDON (Reuters) - GlaxoSmithKline Plc plans to develop an experimental AIDS vaccine by "piggy-backing" on a shot against measles.
Europe's biggest drug maker and France's Institut Pasteur intend to make the vaccine by fusing genes from the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) onto an existing vaccine for the childhood disease, the two organisations said on Monday.
GSK Biologicals -- Glaxo's vaccines unit -- will licence the measles vaccine vector, or carrier, technology from Institut Pasteur, and researchers from both groups will jointly develop the new vaccine.
The project is the latest in a range of novel approaches to fighting HIV, which has killed more than 3.1 million people this year alone.
Scientists believe a vaccine is the best hope for ending the epidemic. However, the virus has proved a far more difficult for vaccine developers to outwit than anyone anticipated when the first case of HIV/AIDS was reported in 1981.
Glaxo believes adapting a measles shot is a promising approach, since the vaccine against this old disease is known to give very long-lasting immunity.
The hope is that using it as a carrier to deliver HIV proteins will produce a similarly potent and long-lasting vaccine to prevent AIDS.
The are no guarantees of success, however, and the project will take many years of research before scientists know whether they can manufacture a safe and effective therapy.
PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP
The research will be carried out under a public-private collaboration, and the initial project is being supported by a grant of 5.5 million euros from the European Union.
Four research centres will be involved in France, Belgium and Britain, and the partners hope to start clinical studies in about three years.
Public-private partnerships are increasingly being used to tackle diseases, including malaria and tuberculosis, that occur primarily in poor countries where Western pharmaceutical companies stand little chance of making money.
In exchange for public sector support, companies agree to make any successful medicines available in developing countries at affordable prices.
Glaxo, like many of its rivals, is pursuing a number of different AIDS vaccine ideas.
Earlier this year it signed a collaboration with the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative to develop a vaccine using an adapted chimpanzee virus, known as an adenovirus, to carry HIV proteins into cells and trigger an immune response.
It also has a third in-house AIDS vaccine project, and experts believe any successful AIDS vaccine might have to combine a number of such different approaches.
Other companies are also stepping up work in the hunt for a vaccine, with Merck & Co. inc. arguably leading the field.
In September this year the U.S. company said it was doubling enrolment into a clinical trial of its leading AIDS vaccine candidate following encouraging initial results, though final results of the trial will not be available until at least 2008.
Thu Dec 1, 9:57 AM ET
A vaccine undergoing early trials in Sweden is reviving hopes for a so-called DNA vaccine against the AIDS virus.
The vaccine has successfully completed the first phase of tests among 40 Swedish HIV-negative volunteers, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm said in a statement coinciding with World AIDS Day.
"It has been more effective than we thought it would be," Eric Sandstroem, professor and head of clinical testing at the institute told AFP.
"We have also failed to find any vaccine-related side effects at all," he added Thursday.
"There is every reason to be hopeful, even though the study is not finished," Karolinska professor Britta Wahren who developed the vaccine said.
Trials for new vaccines undergo a long, three phase process. In the first phase, the formula is tested on a small group of volunteers to see primarily whether it is safe, but also to see whether it induces a response from the immune system.
After that it goes through progressively wider trials, among thousands of volunteers, to assess effectiveness.
DNA vaccines are an experimental technology in which one or more genes coding for specific antigens -- surface proteins on the virus -- are directly injected into the body.
The goal is that they induce an immune response so that the body's defences recognize the virus if it ever enters the body.
"The technology is highly promising for producing simple, inexpensive and heat-stable vaccines," the US-headquartered International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) says.
However, there have been a lot of disappointments with this approach, said Sandstroem.
"There has been skepticism about whether it would in fact be possible to use DNA vaccines for HIV on humans. In that context our findings are really uplifting," Sandstroem said.
The researchers are now planning on entering a second phase of testing in which a Modified Vaccinia Ankara (MVA) vaccine is used to try to boost immune response.
"There is much to indicate that the final result when the study is finished will be above our expectations," Sandstroem said, adding that 38 of the subjects from the first phase of the study had already volunteered for the second phase.
The trial wraps up next May or June. The researchers hope to launch a third phase of tests in Tanzania to determine whether the vaccine actually limits the effects of the virus for those infected with HIV.
In the 24-year history of AIDS, only one vaccine has completed the full three-phase trial process -- AIDSVAX, which was found to be a disappointing failure.
At the moment, more than 30 candidate AIDS vaccines are being tested in small-scale human clinical trials around the world, the majority of which began in the past four years in response to greater financial help
Thu Dec 1, 5:11 PM ET
The availability of drugs to stimulate sexual drive such as Viagra or Cialis may contribute to a recent spike in the number of Canadians with HIV, according to health officials.
New statistics collected by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control in Canada's westernmost province showed men and women aged 55 or older account for 8.7 percent of all new HIV infections, more than double the number of new cases a decade ago.
Canada-wide figures depict a similar trend and while US data was not available, Canadian officials suspect older Americans are vulnerable to higher infection rates too, since other health and social trends tend to cross the Canada-US border.
HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.
Provincial health officer Perry Kendall blamed an increase in promiscuity among a generation seeing itself as eternally young and possibly using the new drugs after the divorce or death of a spouse, which is more common with age.
"There's been a huge market for aphrodisiacs for thousands of years, whether its seal penises or rhino horns, but only recently have we had anything that actually worked," Kendall said.
"As a result, we're seeing increased sexual activity outside of committed relationships among older people who don't consider themselves to be old fogies or retirees," he said.
Marci Summers of the Positive Women's Network told the Vancouver Sun that this generation seems less likely to practice safe sex.
"For women coming out of marriages or out of long-term relationships and into the dating game again, it's the last thing on their mind," she said.
"Most middle-aged men are going to say: 'A condom? Are you kidding? I haven't used one of those since I was 25'."
Infection rates among men and women 55 or older are still less than other age groups. Rates of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, remain highest in young people, aged 15 to 24, who are the most sexually active of any group, officials said.