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

L.A. County Planning to Distribute Controversial HIV-Prevention Drug

Los Angeles County supervisors voted Tuesday to develop a plan to distribute a controversial HIV-prevention drug to county residents at high risk of contracting the virus.

Treatment

FDA Approves Edible Medicine For Kids With HIV That Will Save More Young Lives

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved an edible antiretroviral formulation for children who have HIV, UNICEF reported last Friday.

Miscellaneous

Activist Argues The Conversation About AIDS Reflects The 'Diminishing Of Black Lives'

We may be closer than ever to "the beginning of the end of the AIDS epidemic," but Phill Wilson, president and CEO of the Black AIDS Institute, says it's too early to declare victory just yet.

Extensively Drug Resistant: What is XDR TB?

A woman who traveled from India is being treated at the National Institutes of Health for an almost impossible to cure form of tuberculosis called XDR TB. Here are answers to five top questions about the infection.

Health Care Expansion Is Rejected in Florida

MIAMI - In another rebuke of the Obama administration's efforts to expand health care to the uninsured, Florida's Republican-led House of Representatives soundly rejected a plan on Friday that state officials said would have covered as many as 650,000 residents.

Hepatitis B and C Co-Infection Linked to Worse Liver Fibrosis Than Hepatitis B Alone

People with both hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) co-infection may experience more rapid and severe liver disease progression than those with hepatitis B alone, though HBV/HCV co-infection did not appear to worsen hepatitis C progression, according to a French study presented at the European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL) 50th International Liver Congress in April in Vienna, Austria.

HealthWise: Hepatitis C and Pain -- Part 1

Hepatitis C or no hepatitis C, everyone experiences pain from time to time. However, if you have chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, you are likely to have pain. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimates that around 100 million Americans have pain. Compare this to the 3 million Americans living with HCV, how do you know if HCV or something else is causing your pain? This two-part series will explore hepatitis C and pain.

Kalief Browder, 1993-2015

Last fall, I wrote about a young man named Kalief Browder, who spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime. He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a robbery he insisted he had not committed. Then he spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he attempted to end his life several times. Once, in February, 2012, he ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose, and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell.

Mario Cooper, Fulcrum of Black and HIV Activism Movements, Dead at 61

Audre Lorde wrote, "There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives." In the world of HIV activism, that quote was embodied wholly by the life and work of Mario Cooper, who passed away at the age of 61. Cooper had been living with HIV since the early 1990s, but he died after he ceased eating, according to his sister Peggy Cooper Cafritz.

Meth Finds a New Market in New York

The waiting room of Gay Men of African Descent, a service agency near Downtown Brooklyn, is almost always quiet and empty. Artful photographs of naked men under tinted lights hang on the walls without an audience. Magazines for people who are H.I.V. positive sit untouched in a swirl on a carved African pedestal.

Transgender HIV-Infected Women in US Have Poorer Disease Control and Unmet Basic Needs

New Rochelle, NY, June 8, 2015--A new CDC study that combines 3 years of data to produce nationally representative estimates characterizing HIV-infected adults receiving care in the U.S. shows that those who identify as transgender women are significantly less likely to adhere to anti-HIV medication regimens and to achieve viral suppression. In addition, they have higher unmet needs for basic services such as food and housing than non-transgender men.

Transgender Model Shauna Brooks Speaks Out

Imagine waking up feeling trapped in a body that doesn't match how you feel or what your mind responds to. That is the reality for many-if not all-transgender women who have taken the steps toward transitioning into their true selves. Hailing from the streets of Virginia from Pacific Islander and Black roots, 27-year-old transgender model Shauna Brooks identified with being feminine early on.

UBC Researcher Gets $1-Million Grant to Study Link Between Pot, HIV/AIDS

A University of B.C. researcher who recently found that daily pot use might help fight HIV/AIDS is getting a $1-million grant from a commercial cannabis grower, which could lead to more clinical evidence for doctors skeptical of a drug still outlawed in Canada.

What Makes a Woman?

Do women and men have different brains? Back when Lawrence H. Summers was president of Harvard and suggested that they did, the reaction was swift and merciless. Pundits branded him sexist. Faculty members deemed him a troglodyte. Alumni withheld donations. But when Bruce Jenner said much the same thing in an April interview with Diane Sawyer, he was lionized for his bravery, even for his progressivism.

"My brain is much more female than it is male," he told her, explaining how he knew that he was transgender.

You Ain't the ONLY Woman: The White Cis Grasp on Womanhood Is Failing

Before Laverne Cox draped her gorgeous brown legs over a lucky sheet in a nude shoot for Allure, before "feminist" writer Megan Murphy gagged on all that Black girl magic and condemned our praise of Cox's beauty as "anti-revolutionary," Sojourner Truth asked White suffragists, "ain't I a woman?"