Cost-Effective HIV Prevention In S. And E. Africa By Scaling-Up Voluntary Male Circumcision
A collection of nine new articles to be published in PLoS Medicine and PLoS ONE, in conjunction with the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the United States President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), highlights how scaling up voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) for HIV prevention in eastern and southern Africa can help prevent HIV not only at individual but also at community and population level as well as lead to substantial cost savings for countries due to averted treatment and care costs.
How Fruit Flies Can Teach Us About Curing Chronic Pain And Halting Mosquito-Borne Diseases
Studies of a protein that fruit flies use to sense heat and chemicals may someday provide solutions to human pain and the control of disease-spreading mosquitoes. In the current issue of the journal Nature, biologist Paul Garrity of the National Center for Behavioral Genomics at Brandeis University and his team, spearheaded by KyeongJin Kang and Vince Panzano in the Garrity lab, report how fruit flies distinguish the warmth of a summer day from the pungency of wasabi by using TRPA1, a protein whose human relative is critical for contolling pain and inflammation.
Study Advances HIV Vaccine Research: Antibody Recognizes Key Sugars On HIV Surface
HIV is coated in sugars that usually hide the virus from the immune system. Newly published research reveals how one broadly neutralizing HIV antibody actually uses part of the sugary cloak to help bind to the virus. The antibody binding site, called the V1/V2 region, represents a suitable HIV vaccine target, according to the scientists who conducted the study. In addition, their research reveals the detailed structure of the V1/V2 region, the last part of the virus surface to be visualized at the atomic level.