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A cross-section of articles we've read this week about HIV/AIDS, STIs and a wide cross-section of structural and systemic factors impacting HIV/AIDS in Black communities.
Prevention
A mathematical model developed by NIH grantees predicts that women must take the antiretroviral medication Truvada daily to prevent HIV infection via vaginal sex, whereas just two doses per week can protect men from HIV infection via anal sex. This finding helps explain why two large clinical trials testing HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, in women failed to show efficacy. Participants in the VOICE and FEM-PrEP trials of Truvada and tenofovir (another antiretroviral) for HIV prevention were counseled to take one of the medications daily. However, because they actually took the antiretroviral only about 29 percent of the time in VOICE and about 36 percent of the time in FEM-PrEP, the PrEP strategy did not work.
Science
The first structure of the immature form of HIV at a high enough resolution has been obtained by researchers, allowing them to pinpoint exactly where each building block sits in the virus. The study reveals that the building blocks of the immature form of HIV are arranged in a surprising way.
French scientists on Tuesday unveiled the genetic mechanism by which they believe two men were spontaneously cured of HIV, and said the discovery may offer a new strategy in the fight against AIDS.
Scientists have developed a novel topical microbicide loaded with hyaluronic acid (HA) nanofibers that could potentially prevent transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) through the vaginal mucosa. This research is being presented at the 2014 American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) Annual Meeting and Exposition, the world's largest pharmaceutical sciences meeting, in San Diego, Nov. 2-6.
Treatment
A new research examining the effectiveness of current HCV therapies revealed HIV patients coinfected with certain genotypes of Hepatitis C are harder to treat, a report on health news site Healio.com said.
Miscellaneous
In addition to providing other potential benefits to public health, all of those tweets and Facebook posts could help curb the spread of HIV. Although public health researchers have focused early applications of social media on reliably monitoring the spread of diseases such as the flu, a new article tells of a future in which social media might predict and even change biomedical outcomes.
As the world focuses on Ebola, we must not forget that HIV/AIDS presents a far greater challenge in the world of vaccines.
President Barack Obama said he is eager to work with the new Congress to make the next few years as productive as possible, but he said he expects them to disagree on some key issues.
Here in the U.S., AIDS can feel like yesterday's news, and many funders long ago moved on to other issues, including many LGBT funders who've been focused on rights issues.
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