NAPWA

Press release

Organised in conjunction with the IAS 2011

The new national strategies for BBVs and STIs have been released.

Although the Asia-Pacific region has witnessed widespread gains in combating the spread of HIV, experts at a United Nations meeting were told today that the epidemic is still outpacing the region’s efforts against new infections.

A coalition of business and social media moguls aims to eliminate mother-to-child HIV transmission by 2015, The Associated Press (AP) reports.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is evaluating a range of experimental devices to make male circumcision faster and easier, The New York Times reports.

An organization devoted to ridding the world of AIDS is asking a company developing cutting-edge HIV treatment and prevention drugs to slow down.

The British HIV Association (BHIVA) today recommends that doctors should discuss the evidence for the effectiveness of antiretroviral treatment as prevention with all patients with HIV, and that it should be offered those who want to protect their partners from the risk of HIV infection – even if they have no immediate clinical need for treatment themselves.

Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully has offered an assurance New Zealand supports a recommendation for Commonwealth nations to end to end the discrimination and criminalisation of gay people, in order to effectively fight HIV and AIDS.

Government leaders, civil society representatives and people living with HIV from 34 Asia-Pacific countries are meeting in Bangkok, to speed up progress towards an AIDS-free region.

The British HIV Association (BHIVA) today recommends that doctors should discuss the evidence for the effectiveness of antiretroviral treatment as prevention with all patients with HIV, and that it should be offered those who want to protect their partners from the risk of HIV infection – even if they have no immediate clinical need

Women using injectable (hormonal) contraceptives had a significantly lower rate of pregnancy compared to those using oral contraception in a major HIV prevention study, researchers report in the advance online edition of AIDS. However, the same study also found that women who used an injectable hormonal contraceptive method were at higher risk of

Men who have sex with men may now be at considerably higher risk of acquiring HIV than other at-risk groups such as female sex workers or young people of either sex, if findings by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) of HIV incidence at two centres in Kenya can be generalised to other populations. The

A pharmaceutical company has applied to the federal Food and Drug Administration to market its HIV treatment medication Truvada as a HIV prevention pill.

Raltegravir could have a “useful” role in HIV post-exposure prophylaxis, according to investigators from the US writing in the online edition of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. Doctors in Boston, Massachusetts, prescribed a post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) regimen of raltegravir (Isentress) with tenofovir and FTC (Truvada) to 100 patients after possible sexual exposure to HIV.

Seeking to understand why adherence to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) was extremely high in a study of serodiscordant couples, qualitative researchers have found that trial participants saw PrEP as a way they could preserve their relationship despite the pressures created by the knowledge of different HIV status and the risk of infection. In an article published

The performance of OraQuick, a widely used rapid point-of-care test for HIV diagnosis, is slightly poorer when testing oral fluid samples than when testing blood samples, according to a meta-analysis, published in the online edition of Lancet Infectious Diseases this week.The authors also found that if the test is used in low prevalence settings with oral fluid samples, over one in ten reactive results may turn out to be false-positives.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Bill Gates promised $750 million from his foundation to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, according to a Global Fund statement.

Nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente (KP) has launched the "Kaiser Permanente HIV Challenge," an effort to push providers and clinics to improve access and results of care, according to a KP statement.

Test results from the Oraquick rapid HIV test are slightly more accurate when they use blood samples compared with saliva samples, according to a University Health Center of Montreal study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases and reported by MedPage Today.