House Spending Proposal Sets Back Domestic HIV AIDS Programs
"If ever passed, this spending bill would set back the progress we are making in preventing HIV and providing basic care and treatment for those who have HIV/AIDS in our country, " commented Carl Schmid, Deputy Executive Director of The AIDS Institute. House Labor, HHS, Education and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Denny Rehberg (R-MT) introduced a fiscal year 2012 spending bill that guts many programs, including health reform, and resurrects non-science based prevention policies.
Home Based Supervised Oral HIV Self-testing In Malawi Is Satisfactory And Reliable
Augustine Choko of the Malawi-Liverpool Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Program in Malawi and her team assessed the uptake and accuracy of home-based supervised oral HIV self-testing in Malawi, proving that this approach is efficient in a high-prevalence, low-income setting. Their findings published in this week's PLoS Medicine, suggest that in urban African settings with high HIV prevalence, communities welcome self-testing for HIV combined with other HIV counseling and testing strategies.
Potent Antibody Response To Retroviruses Controlled By Ancient Gene
A researcher at MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer research has identified a gene that controls the process by which antibodies gain their ability to combat retroviruses. Edward Browne shows that the gene TLR7 allows the antibody generating B cells to detect the presence of a retrovirus and promotes a process by which antibodies gain strength and potency, called a germinal center reaction. The findings are published in the Open Access journal PLoS Pathogens. TLR7 is a member of an ancient family of genes whose distant ancestors can also be found as far back as insects and worms, but these results show that the immune system has co-opted these genes for a new purpose = the generation of antibodies.