Today in Pictures-Weekend roundup
An Indian couple walks past a 50 foot long AIDS red ribbon sand sculpture created by Sudarshan Pattnaik on World AIDS Day in Puri, India, on Monday. Biswaranjan Rout / AP
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Couple boogies into spotlight with viral wedding
Couple boogies into spotlight with viral wedding
By Lisa Respers France CNN (CNN) -- Sometimes, the effects of fame can ripple like a stone dropped in a pond. Take the case of Minnesota residents Kevin Heinz and Jill Peterson. The couple had a fun idea for their wedding party to do a nontraditional procession to a catchy tune, "Forever" by Chris Brown....
What If ... Your Lover Had HIV?
What If ... Your Lover Had HIV?
What if your significant other told you that they were infected with HIV or AIDS? What would you do? Would you stay in the relationship or would you leave? That is the question I've asked myself many times since learning that my best friend was infected by her fiancé.
She chose to stay for many reasons but the main reason she chose to stay was out of fear of loneliness. While I realize that many people remain in relationships for the wrong reasons, at some point you have to wonder if it's really worth it.
I want to share three stories with you about choices: The choice to stay; the choice to leave; and the choice not to reveal status.
Tia's Story: The choice to stay
Back in 1993 there wasn't enough information about HIV and AIDS for Tia to make an educated decision. At the request of her fiancé, she got tested. She tested positive but chose to stay even after she found out that they were in different stages of the virus. She battled with feelings of shame, fear, embarrassment and hopelessness.
HIV/AIDS and Tumours
HIV/AIDS and Tumours
(1) Kaposi's Sarcoma
HIV/AIDS and Tumours (1) Kaposi's Sarcoma
Photo: Philippe Kestelyn
HIV/AIDS and the Eye Teaching Set 12/24
Why Aids is Worse in africa
Why Aids is Worse in africa
Photo by Getty Images
By Anthony RuthPublished: May 22, 2007
As an economics student at Harvard, Emily Oster couldn’t figure out why no one in her field was working on HIV/AIDS—particularly what’s causing the epidemic in Africa—so she took up the topic herself. Now a research fellow at the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory, she’s gottenAfricans are four to five times more likely to contract HIV from unprotected intercourse with an HIV-positive person. Oster attributes this to higher instances of bacterial and viral STDs in Africans—nearly half carry the herpes virus—which make them more susceptible to HIV.
Finally, Oster used death rates to estimate the prevalence of AIDS in the general African population. She found that the popular UN estimates of African AIDS cases, which are based on tests of pregnant women at prenatal clinics, are about three times too high. However, Oster says, the news is not as good as it sounds. “My study, which estimated changes in the infection rate over time, also drew a second, chilling conclusion: In Africa, HIV is spreading as quickly as ever.”
In addition to the December Esquire article, Oster’s research on AIDS was featured in a January New York Times story on the future of economics.
skip to sidebar HIV AIDS
skip to sidebar HIV AIDS
Main article: Origin of AIDSAIDS was first reported June 5, 1981, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recorded a cluster of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (now still classified as PCP but known to be caused by Pneumocystis jirovecii) in five homosexual men in Los Angeles.[138] In the beginning, the CDC did not have an official name for the disease, often referring to it by way of the diseases that were associated with it, for example, lymphadenopathy, the disease after which the discoverers of HIV originally named the virus.[70][71] They also used Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections, the name by which a task force had been set up in 1981.[139] In the general press, the term GRID, which stood for Gay-related immune deficiency, had been coined.[140] The CDC, in search of a name, and looking at the infected communities coined “the 4H disease,” as it seemed to single out Haitians, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and heroin users.[141] However, after determining that AIDS was not isolated to the homosexual community,[139] the term GRID became misleading and AIDS was introduced at a meeting in July 1982.[142] By September 1982 the CDC started using the name AIDS, and properly defined the illness.[143]A more controversial theory known as the OPV AIDS hypothesis suggests that the AIDS epidemic was inadvertently started in the late 1950s in the Belgian Congo by Hilary Koprowski's research into a poliomyelitis vaccine.[144][145] According to scientific consensus, this scenario is not supported by the available evidence.[146][147][148]A recent study states that HIV probably moved from Africa to Haiti and then entered the United States around 1969.[149
Burns
Burns
rimary author(s): Tom Potokar, Consultant Plastic Surgeon and Prakash Lohana, SHO in Plastic Surgery, Welsh Centre for Burns and Plastic Surgery, UK.
Latest version: March 2007
HIV/AIDS
HIV/AIDS
rimary author(s): Tom Potokar, Consultant Plastic Surgeon and Prakash Lohana, SHO in Plastic Surgery, Welsh Centre for Burns and Plastic Surgery, UK.
skip to main | skip to sidebar HIV AIDS
skip to main | skip to sidebar HIV AIDS
GENEVA: The World Health Organisation warned on Tuesday that progress in tackling tuberculosis was far too slow, as it doubled its estimate of the ravages the disease is causing among HIV/Aids patients.Some 9.27 million people contracted TB in 2007, an increase of about 30,000 over the previous year mainly in line with population growth, according to the WHO’s annual report on tuberculosis control.They included some 1.4 million people with HIV/Aids, compared to an estimated 600,000 in 2006 reported last year.More than one death in four — 456,000 of the 1.75 million tuberculosis deaths recorded in 2007 — is now thought to involve an HIV/Aids patient.‘These findings point to an urgent need to find, prevent and treat tuberculosis in people living with HIV and to test for HIV in all patients with TB in order to provide prevention, treatment and care,’ said WHO Director General Margaret Chan in a statement.However, the report reiterated that there were severe shortcomings in tackling tuberculosis and coordinated care for both diseases largely due to feeble heath care in the developing countries that are the hardest hit.Just one in seven HIV patients get vital preventive treatment for TB, said WHO HIV/Aids director Kevin De Cock.Overall, more than one third of tuberculosis cases are not diagnosed, leaving many out of reach of treatment and, crucially, increasing the risk of spreading the contagious disease, according to the UN health agency.While the overall rate of TB infection fell in three years to 139 cases per 100,000 people, the improvement was too slow, said Mario Raviglione, the agency’s anti-tuberculosis chief.’We are talking about less than one per cent per year, which will get us to potentially eliminate TB in a very distant future: we are talking centuries if not millenia in a way,’ he told journalists. The growth in the estimated impact on HIV/Aids patients was largely down to better data and understanding.’The revision is illustrative of the fact that people living with HIV have a risk of developing tuberculosis that’s 20 times greater than HIV negative people,’ said De Cock.Despite progress in testing TB patients for HIV in Africa, the combination of poor diagnosis, rising drug resistance and the evidence of the impact on highly vulnerable HIV/Aids patients have heightened alarm among health experts.Detection of the highly contagious disease has stagnated after a sharp improvement nine years ago, while the impact drug resistant strains of the TB bacteria has grown to infect an estimated 500,000 people.Just one per cent of them receive treatment and 150,000 of them die, according to the WHO, which regards resistance as the ‘achilles heel’ of the anti-TB drive.‘The scale-up of interventions to deal with multidrug TB is not at the pace we would like to see and is far from the targets that have been established,’ Raviglione said.Furthermore, 10 per cent of them were almost incurable extra-resistant strains (XDR-TB) that are now found in 55 countries.The WHO is gathering the 27 countries that account for 85 per cent of multidrug resistant cases of tuberculosis — including India, China, Russia, South Africa and Bangladesh - for a meeting in Beijing on April 1.‘You could be in middle of a drug resistant TB epidemic and not even know about it,’ De Cock pointed out.
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