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Judd Campaign stop AIDS in India

Mumbai - Campaign AIDS non-stoped to be emboldened. This time, Hollywood artist Ashley Judd also join the campaign in India.

Judd seen to motivated when have interaction with all of prostitute women in Kamathipura, India, in Saturday local time. The Beautiful actress is soverigned to become global ambassador for youth AIDS representing one part of from a nonprofit institute, Population Services International ( PSI).

Before campaigning, Judd invaded by a fans to come near her. As a result, such as those which told by a the organizational press secretary, K.Balaji, some event must be delayed for several hours. Security staff of Judd assist her to go out from large crowd and usher it to car.Then, she come again and come in contact with all prostitute women.

Judd will experience played in documenter film with the former miss Universe of India origin which now become the Bollywood actress, Sushimita Sen. Its Plan, the documenter film will displayed in National Geographic channel at 1 December according with the Day of world AIDS.

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Circumcision May Help Protect Against HIV

THURSDAY, Feb. 22 (HealthDay News) -- Getting circumcised may reduce men's risk of acquiring HIV, according to a study conducted in Africa.

"Our study shows that circumcised men had 53 percent fewer HIV infections than uncircumcised men," lead study author Robert Bailey, professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), said in a prepared statement.

For the study, which is published in the Feb. 24 issue of The Lancet, researchers followed a group of 2,784 HIV-negative, uncircumcised men aged 18-24 years for two years.

The men were living in Kisumu, Kenya, where an estimated 26 percent of uncircumcised men are infected with HIV by age 25. Most of the men were Luo, a group that does not traditionally practice circumcision.

The researchers assigned half of the men to voluntary circumcision, and the other half remained uncircumcised during the study.

All of the participants received free HIV testing and counseling, medical care, tests and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, condoms and behavioral risk counseling during periodic assessments throughout the study.

Forty-seven of the 1,391 uncircumcised men contracted HIV during the two-year study, compared with 22 of the 1,393 circumcised men.

The risks associated with circumcision were minimal, the researchers said. According to Bailey, 1.7 percent of the circumcision surgeries were associated with minor complications (e.g., bleeding, mild infection), and there were no severe adverse effects.

Bailey cautioned that there could be a downside to this approach: that circumcised men may feel like they are protected from HIV and may be therefore more likely to engage in risky behavior.

"Circumcision is by no means a natural condom," said Bailey.

But the researchers are hopeful that, when integrated with other prevention and reproductive health services, circumcision may be able to help prevent the spread of HIV.

"This is really the first good news we've had in quite a long time. If we can reduce the risk of infection by such a substantial amount, then we can save a lot of lives," said Bailey.

www.healthday.com

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Bill Gates, Canada team up to fight AIDS

OTTAWA (AFP) - Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was blasted for shunning AIDS talks in 2006, and software mogul Bill Gates pledged funding to accelerate the development of anHIV/AIDS vaccine.

Ottawa will contribute 111 million Canadian dollars (95 million US) toward international research efforts and to build a Canadian facility to make vaccine candidates for use in clinical trials, while the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will provide 28 million Canadian dollars (24 million US).

The collaboration will "accelerate the pace towards the discovery of an HIV vaccine ... move vaccines to the clinical trial stage more quickly and improve access to an eventual vaccine," Harper told reporters.

The result would spare "millions of people from the horrific reality of HIV-AIDS," he said.

Bill Gates echoed Harper, saying the funding will "make a big difference."

"Most scientists think that it probably will take more than ten years (to create a vaccine). We could get lucky, it could happen sooner than that. But with all tough problems, the more energy we put into it, clearly that's going to cut down the amount of time required," he said.

Gates and his wife, in a keynote speech at the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto in August vowed that the mighty cheque-wielding charity that bears his name would make AIDS its top priority.

In the run-up to the six-day AIDS meet that attracted 21,000 delegates, the Gates Foundation announced help of 500 million dollars to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, bringing their pledges to the agency to 650 million dollars.

This came only weeks after a contribution of 287 million dollars to speed the development of an HIV vaccine. The Foundation stumped up 60 million dollars for microbicide research in 2003, and 50 million dollars for Botswana in 2000.

Harper meanwhile was criticized for not attending the conference and for postponing a much-anticipated AIDS funding announcement, until now.

www.afp.com

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Gambia's president claims he has cure for AIDS

BANJUL, Gambia - From the pockets of his billowing white robe, Gambia’s president pulls out a plastic container, closes his eyes in prayer and rubs a green herbal paste onto the rib cage of the patient — a concoction he claims is a cure for AIDS.

He then orders the thin man to swallow a bitter yellow drink, followed by two bananas.

“Whatever you do, there are bound to be skeptics, but I can tell you my method is foolproof,” President Yahya Jammeh told an Associated Press reporter, surrounded by bodyguards in his presidential compound. “Mine is not an argument, mine is a proof. It’s a declaration. I can cure AIDS and I will.”

In a continent suffering from the world’s worst AIDS epidemic, Jammeh’s claims of a miracle cure are alarming public health workers already struggling against faith-healers dispensing herbal remedies from inside thatched huts.

The biggest concern is that the Gambian leader requires patients to cease their anti-retroviral drugs, a move that risks weakening their immune systems and making them even more prone to infection, said Dr. Antonio Filipe Jr., head of the World Health Organization in neighboring Senegal.

WHO: ‘There is no cure for AIDS’

Since January, when he announced his cure to a gathering of foreign diplomats, Jammeh has thrown the bureaucratic machinery of this small West African country behind the claim. The last six news releases on Gambia’s official Web site are dedicated to the president’s treatment, available to Gambians free of charge. Regular radio and TV addresses publicize it and the Health Ministry has issued a declaration of support.

Although the HIV rate is relatively low in Gambia compared to other African nations — 1.3 percent of the country’s 1.6 million people are infected — the president’s claim has left international health organizations in a bind.

WHO’s Filipe was diplomatic about Jammeh’s claims, saying his organization respects the president’s point of view. But, he added: “As the World Health Organization, we would like to state quite clearly the following — No. 1: so far there is no cure for AIDS.”

Jammeh, a 41-year-old former army colonel who wrested gained control in a 1994 coup, says his treatment is entirely voluntary and argues that his medications cannot be mixed with other drugs because “I don’t want any complications.”

The claim of a cure has prompted comparisons to the South African minister of health who won international ridicule last year for suggesting that a diet of garlic, beet root and lemon juice is more effective than anti-retroviral drugs. South African President Thabo Mbeki has been accused of not addressing the epidemic: His government did not provide AIDS drugs until a lawsuit by AIDS activists forced it to in 2002.

Jammeh has gone to great lengths to prove his claim, sending blood samples of the first nine patients to a lab in Senegal for testing.

A letter on the lab’s stationery indicates that of the nine, four had undetectable viral loads, one had a moderate viral load and three had high loads, a result posted on the government’s Web site as proof of a cure.

However, the lab technician who performed the tests warned they are not conclusive since the blood samples were only taken after the treatment.

“There is no baseline ... You can’t prove that someone has been cured of AIDS from just one data point. It’s dishonest of the Gambian government to use our results in this way,” said Dr. Coumba Toure Kane, head of the molecular biology unit at Senegal’s Cheikh Anta Diop University.

Waiting in plastic chairs for treatment at the presidential compound last week, Jammeh’s patients said they don’t need lab results to tell them they feel better.

“It feels as if the president took the pain out of my body,” Ousman Sowe, 54, told the AP. Diagnosed with HIV in 1996, he is among the first nine men and women Jammeh has treated and has been under the Gambian leader’s care for nearly a month.

“My appetite has come back and I have gained weight,” said Lamin Ceesay, thin from a nine-year battle with HIV.

Jammeh has refused to disclose details of his herbal concoction, saying only that it uses seven plants, “three of which are not from Gambia.”

‘You will all be cured’

Treatment begins with the president applying the green paste, stored inside a deli-style plastic container. Next comes a gray-colored solution contained in an old Evian bottle and splashed on the patient’s skin. This is followed by a yellowish, tealike brew which patients are asked to drink. The therapy is administered many times over several weeks.

After the treatment session last week, Jammeh emerged carrying a tall wooden staff, a string of Islamic prayer beads and a leather-bound Quran. In front of him, 30 new patients waited on lawn chairs, drawn from the roughly 20,000 people currently living with HIV in Gambia.

He told them that during treatment, they must cease drinking alcohol, tea and coffee. They also cannot eat kola nuts or have sex.

Jammeh then held up the Quran, pointing it at each of the patients: “In the name of Allah, in three to 30 days you will all be cured,” he said.

The patients were then herded into a minibus and driven to an empty hospital ward on the outskirts of the capital, where they will stay in dormitory-style rooms with sheets covering the windows.

Lying on a mat on the tiled floor in the hospital ward, a 19-year-old girl struggled to say her name, spitting gray-colored phlegm into her scarf. Like everyone else in the concrete ward, she is banned from taking anti-retroviral drugs.

Nearby was 25-year-old Amadou Jallow, who recently quit his job at a tourist hotel after his mother was diagnosed with AIDS. In his savings account is $296 — enough, he said, to last him the 30 days Jammeh promises it will take to heal his mother.

“I’m just afraid that, what if my account runs low?” he said. “But by then, I think she will be cured.”

www.ap.org

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Zimbabwe to expand free AIDS drugs roll-out programme

HARARE-AIDS-ravaged Zimbabwe plans to expand its free AIDS drugs roll-out programme, reaching out to 100,000 more patients by the end of the year, the country's health minister said this week.


With only 60,000 people currently accessing life-prolonging anti-retrovial (ARV) therapy, Health and Child Welfare Minister David Parirenyatwa said "at least 300,000 people will have access to the drugs by 2010".

"The aim is to have universal access to ARVs by 2010 and we know we are going to achieve that ... with the assistance of our partners and also money we will avail as government," Friday's official Herald newspaper quoted him as saying.

Parirenyatwa, who was speaking on Wednesday evening in the southwestern mining town of Kadoma, said the fresh programme would be bankrolled by the government, by donors through the United Nations Global Fund and by non-governmental organisations working in the southern African nation.

Zimbabwe last year received a 65-million-dollar grant from the Global Fund to bolster its fight against HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

It is one of the countries hardest hit by the HIV and AIDS pandemic, with at least 3,000 people dying weekly from AIDS-related illness -- or about one person every three minutes -- according to the National AIDS Council.

Zimbabwe has also experienced an upsurge in the number of tuberculosis cases linked to HIV and AIDS.

The National Aids Council says the HIV prevalence rate dropped from 24.6 percent in 2003 to 20.1 percent in 2005 and about 18.1 percent last year.

The health ministry last year signed another 40-million-dollar deal with Britain, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and the UN agencies in the country to launch new HIV/AIDS projects.

Britain, Norway, Ireland and Sweden are to provide money while UN agencies are to provide technical support for the projects, which are set to run for the next three years.

www.afp.com

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Circumcision may cut risk of HIV

WASHINGTON - Circumcising adult men may reduce by half their risk of getting the AIDS virus through heterosexual intercourse, the U.S. government announced Wednesday, as it shut down two studies in Africa testing the link.
The National Institutes of Health closed the studies in Kenya and Uganda early, when safety monitors took a look at initial results this week and spotted the protection. The studies' uncircumcised men are being offered the chance to undergo the procedure.
The link between male circumcision and HIV prevention was noted as long ago as the late 1980s. The first major clinical trial, of 3,000 men in South Africa, found last year that circumcision cut the HIV risk by 60 percent.

Still, many AIDS specialists had been awaiting the NIH's results as a final confirmation.

"Male circumcision can lower both an individual's risk of infection, and hopefully the rate of HIV spread through the community," said AIDS expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

But it's not perfect protection, Fauci stressed. Men who become circumcised must not quit using condoms nor take other risks — and circumcision offers no protection from HIV acquired through anal sex or injection drug use, he noted.

"It's not a magic bullet, but a potentially important intervention," agreed Dr. Kevin De Cock of the
World Health Organization.

Male circumcision is common at birth in the United States. But in sub-Saharan Africa, home to more than half of the world's almost 40 million HIV-infected people, there are large swaths of populations where male circumcision is rare.

The WHO plans an international meeting early next year to discuss the studies' results and how to translate them into policies that promote safe male circumcision — done by trained health workers with sterile equipment — while teaching men that it won't make them invulnerable.

If male circumcision were widely adopted, officials predicted that could help to avert tens of thousands of HIV infections in coming years; Fauci cited one model from South Africa that suggested possibly up to 2 million infections could be averted over a decade.

"This is tremendous news, and it could help millions of men while in turn reducing the risk faced by millions of women," said Paul Zeitz of the Global AIDS Alliance.

Why would male circumcision play a role? Cells in the foreskin of the penis are particularly susceptible to the HIV virus, Fauci explained. Also, the foreskin is more fragile than the tougher skin surrounding it, providing a surface that the virus could penetrate more easily.

Researchers enrolled 2,784 HIV-negative men in Kisumu, Kenya, and 4,996 HIV-negative men in Rakai, Uganda, into the studies. Some were circumcised; others were just monitored.

Over two years, 22 of the circumcised Kenyans became infected with HIV compared with 47 uncircumcised men, a 53 percent reduction. In Uganda, 22 circumcised men became infected vs. 43 of the uncircumcised, a 48 percent reduction.

The researchers are offering all of the studies' uncircumcised men the chance to undergo the procedure, and 80 percent of the uncircumcised Ugandans already have agreed, said lead researcher Ronald Gray of Johns Hopkins University.

Side effects were rare, including some mostly mild infections that were easily treated. The rate of side effects was comparable to those seen in circumcised U.S. infants, said Robert Bailey of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who led the Kenyan trial.

By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer

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