Posts tagged HIV prevention
Vitamin D Helps with Resistance to HIV
9 years ago
When it comes to the poorest nations of the world, an inexpensive means of fighting the spread of HIV is vital. Researchers may have found just such an ally according to a recent study of how vitamin D affects the immune system response to HIV. What did they find?
The Test Subjects
The study was performed using 100 young individuals, half from the Cape area in Africa and the other half from the Xhosa indigenous tribe. Blood samples were taken from the healthy individuals during the sunny summer months when vitamin D levels are the highest and again during the winter when they are at a seasonal low due to less sun exposure. During the winter, both groups proved to be vitamin D deficient, and the women who were in the study suffered even more from the deficiency than men.
Exposure to HIV-1
Next, these blood samples were exposed to HIV-1. After giving the virus nine days to work, the samples were tested. The amazing result was that the vitamin D deficient winter samples were more prone to infection than the summer samples with normal vitamin D levels.
The deficient individuals were next given a six-week supply of vitamin D supplements to get their levels back to normal. Then their blood was taken and tested again. Infection rate was reduced back to what it had been for the summer samples. The results were clear – vitamin D was helping ward off the disease.
Implications
While there is no immunization for HIV, this study reveals that vitamin D can reduce the chances of infection. Since vitamin supplements are far less expensive than vaccinations, this is also a far more viable solution for reducing the risk of infection in developing countries. Also, additional health benefits associated with vitamin D would be achieved by combating deficiency. It’s a win-win for some of the underdeveloped countries that are the hardest hit by the spread of HIV.
Risk of HIV Decreases with More Secondary Education
9 years ago
A study was performed in Botswana that revealed just one year more of secondary education produced a drastic reduction in the risk of contracting HIV. In a part of the world where approximately 1 in 4 will contract HIV over the course of a decade following school, reducing the percentage to 17 would mean thousands of fewer cases of HIV.
Also interesting to note is the fact that decreased risk of HIV infection was more significant in young women than men. It has been speculated that the reason behind these findings is that the additional year of education during this crucial stage in adolescence keeps students from participating in the same amount of risky behavior they would be taking part in if school were already over. For women especially, education seems to have a major impact, and may be a cost effective way to reduce HIV infection across Africa, where may nations currently do not provide the same educational opportunities for young girls as they do for boys.
What are the implications of this study for a nation plagued by HIV such as Botswana where a 2013 study revealed that 22 percent of individuals in the 15 to 49 age group were infected? The fact is that providing an extra year of schooling to secondary school students for free is far less of a financial burden on the nation than trying to provide treatment after infection.
The 8 percent difference in risk represents a significant improvement for both the health and the economy of the nation. HIV infection is not the only aspect of health that is improved as nations provide more education. Other concerns, such as child mortality, are also positively affected when a nation places a great emphasis on school and learning.
In short, when it comes to risk of HIV infection, education matters. Indeed, no matter where in the world you live, education plays a vital role for children to remain healthy, especially in parts of the world where education has life and death consequences.
New Understanding of Microbicide’s Effectiveness Against HIV Transmission
9 years ago
Researchers of HIV and AIDS have long known that semen has an enhancing quality on the infectiousness of HIV, as it causes the virus cells to cluster together and bind themselves to certain protein strands within the semen fluids, thus increasing their ability to attach to – and infect – host cells. This is a major reason, researchers have learned through studies, why anal sex has the highest risk potential in the transmission of HIV from one person to another. The other major reason for the high risk involved in anal sex is rupturing of anal tissue during intercourse, which causes bleeding and raises the infection potential for both partners. Recently, researchers learned that semen is further problematic in stopping the spread of HIV, as it has been shown to lessen certain antiretroviral microbicide’s effectiveness against HIV.
An antiretroviral microbicide is a new form of anti-HIV gel which is meant to be applied to the vaginal walls prior to sexual intercourse, and which was proven to effectively eliminate the HIV cells – either by killing them or causing them to be unable to bind to any host cells – but this success is only seen in the laboratory. When they started clinical trials in areas of Africa with high infection rates, they noticed that not only were the microbicides ineffective in stopping infection, sometimes they seemed to have the reverse effect, causing it to be more likely for infection to occur. They now know why this happened. The microbicide’s effectiveness against HIV was compromised by proteins within the semen which, while strengthening the HIV cell’s infectiousness, caused the microbicides to be up to twenty times less effective against stopping transmission of the virus. The researchers who conducted the study that lead to this observation are hoping to help women in the Sub-Saharan countries of Africa who, many times, have no choice about safe sex or condom use. If they can work around the negative effects of semen, which some new antiretroviral microbicides are already promising, they can help curb the spread of the disease, in these countries and around the world. As one of the authors of the study says, “This study sheds light on why these microbicides did not work, and it provides us with a way to fix this problem by creating a new compound drug combining antivirals and amyloid inhibitors.” The more they know about each step of the infection process, the more they can break these steps down and stop HIV transmission.
In Africa, Traditional Healers Can Undermine Efforts of Modern HIV Treatments
9 years ago
Imagine you start to show signs of possible HIV infection: your skin color changes, your immune system is visibly weaker than ever before, and a flu-like feeling just won’t go away. You go to your trusted healer, the traditional healer your family has seen for years, decades, possibly generations. Now, imagine this traditional healer tells you that these symptoms are not due to a blood-borne virus infecting your body, but by a curse a neighbor has placed upon you and your family. His or her treatment will not recommend antiretroviral medications, but to chant incantations and rub medical herbs into an open cut made from a razor. Although this is not heard of as a practice in any area of the United States, no matter how rural, this type of traditional healing is still very common in rural areas of Mozambique and other sub-Saharan African countries. When these traditional healers speak of curses and angered ancestors as the causes for the HIV symptoms, there is an inevitable delay between the first signs of symptoms and the administration of the first antiretroviral medicines. Prolonging this crucial timeframe shows that these traditional healers can undermine efforts of modern HIV treatments, which can harm the patient in irreparable ways, possibly causing the individual to develop AIDS before receiving the medicine he or she needs.
A study led by Carolyn Audet, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Health Policy, focused on sub-Saharan African countries. Over 60% of the rural residents in this study who started showing symptoms of HIV infection visited at least one traditional healer before consulting a trained medical professional, sometimes seeing several healers before any doctors. This caused, on average, a two-and-a-half-time longer delay for receiving the needed medicine, as over 50% of those who saw traditional healers first were initially diagnosed with having a curse placed upon them. With countries like Mozambique having over ten percent of its population infected with HIV (in the US it is roughly 0.6%), mistreatment has become an epidemic of serious concern. These delays can undermine efforts of modern HIV treatments, as many traditional healers are resistant to incorporating Western medicine into their religious and healing practices, which can seriously harm or even cause the preventable death of patients before receiving life-saving antiretroviral medicines.
HIV Cells in Semen Infect Through RNA Transmission
9 years ago
In early 2010, scientists at the University of California San Diego’s Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) discovered that seminal HIV infection among men who have sex with men is transmitted through the HIV cell’s RNA, and not the DNA as was previously thought. Later that year it was determined that this is also the case for women who are infected through sex with men – that is, through HIV cells in semen transmitting their RNA structure to the newly infected individual. Understanding this connection is critical, because, “If we want to stop the HIV epidemic, then we must know the mechanisms by which HIV uses human sex to spread,” according to the principal researcher, Davey Smith, MD, MAS. Smith is an associate professor of medicine at the University of California’s San Diego’s Division of Infectious Diseases, and is director of the CFAR’s Viral Pathogenesis Core.
The scientists made this initial discovery of the virus’s transmission by studying male partners in which one man had recently infected the other man. They compared the genetic characteristics of the HIV cells in both partners, knowing that the virus mutates at an extraordinary rate. They learned that there was more of a shared commonality between the viruses found in the seminal plasma – the semen and fluids surrounding them – than the viruses that were located in the seminal cells. HIV’s DNA is commonly found in the host’s cells, where RNA is mostly stored in the host’s plasma. With this asymmetrical commonality between the virus found in the plasma versus the virus inside the host’s cells, the scientists were able to locate the culprit of the initial transmission, which is the virus’s RNA; with this asymmetrical commonality found in every partnership of the men they studied, they determined that it is not a mix of HIV RNA and DNA infecting an individual, but that the RNA, alone, was the transmitter.
Now knowing this source of HIV transmission, scientists and researchers have been able to develop several weapons against HIV infection over the past five years. The HIV cells in semen are now understood more, and with this understanding researchers have been able to determine and develop several things. One discovery is that if a person has no detectable amount of HIV in their bloodstream, as they have been recently infected or because they are taking a successful regimen of antiretroviral medications, there can still be a contagious amount of HIV cells in their semen – and though the possibility of infection is low at that point, it is still possible. Researchers have also been able to develop vaginal gels and ointments – called vaginal microbicides – which are able to attack the HIV cell’s RNA before transmission can take place by infected semen, along with further developing antiretroviral medications which target the virus’s RNA and make it impotent towards further transmission. Though this discovery has not led to a cure within the past five years, it has certainly brought us closer to that possible cure, and has helped prevent further transmission of HIV for thousands.
