Campaign for Better Health Care’s “Shoe Action” Sends Powerful Message
Magic Johnson Testing Tour to Stop at Historically Black Colleges
Detachable Needles on Syringes Promote Hepatitis C Transmission
Campaign for Better Health Care’s "Shoe Action" Sends Powerful Message
As part of the "Get It Done!" campaign, the Campaign for Better Health Care (CBHC) is organizing "shoe actions" at the Illinois offices of Congressional legislators.
In Willowbrook, Illinois last week, more than 35 members of CBHC's 13th District Committee staged a sit-in at their Representative’s office. They delivered shoes to symbolize Illinoisans who have died and will die if health care reform is not passed. They chanted "Get it done," demanding that politicians "stop playing politics and solve the health care crisis."
According to the CBHC, 11,000 Illinoisans have died in the past 15 years due to lack of access to affordable care.
To find out more about these and future actions, go to the CBHC website www.cbhconline.org.
Magic Johnson Testing Tour to Stop at Historically Black Colleges
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) mobile HIV testing unit made stops in Louisiana at Dillard University (February 10) and Xavier University (February 11), followed by a trip to Alabama's Lawson State Community College (February 23). The tour will visit Miles College on February 25 and lastly, the AHF will also host free HIV testing in Georgia at Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, and Spelman College on February 26.
The testing will take place in AHF's new, state-of-the-art "Testing America” mobile HIV testing unit named in honor of and in partnership with basketball legend Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Jr. The AHF/Magic Johnson "Testing America" tour is part of a collaborative effort to raise awareness about the importance of HIV testing and to challenge attitudes about HIV testing and counseling nationwide.
"It is an honor to have seven historically Black colleges participate in AHF's national 'Testing America' Tour. Offering students and staff easy access to free HIV testing is a great opportunity to raise local, as well as national, awareness about how the Black community is disproportionately affected by HIV," said Azul Mares-Del Grasso, Field Services Manager for AHF's National HIV Testing Tour. "Working with respected local partners to offer testing events like these, we hope to get that message out as well as demonstrate just how easy HIV testing can be."
Detachable Needles on Syringes Promote Hepatitis C Transmission
The high incidence of hepatitis C infections among intravenous drug users may be due in part to the use of syringes with detachable needles, which are more likely to transfer viable viruses from one user to the next, according to Yale University researchers. Their study is reputed to be the first that examines the survival of the virus in used syringes.
Dr. Elijah Paintsil of the Yale School of Medicine and his colleagues studied survival of the hepatitis C virus in several types of syringes. They loaded syringes with blood spiked with the virus, depressed the plunger and measured the concentration of hepatitis C virus in the residual blood immediately afterward and nine weeks later.
Paintsil reported at the 17th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections that the virus persisted for nine weeks at most temperatures in so-called tuberculin syringes with detachable needles. The researchers observed far less viable virus in insulin syringes with attached needles.
The detachable-needle syringes are used much more commonly by drug users outside the United States, but Paintsil cautioned that communities operating needle-exchange programs should be aware of the problems with the tuberculin syringes.
On February 4, the AIDS Policy Project, in conjunction with Project Inform, held its first scientific update on HIV eradication, bringing together local experts to provide an overview of an exclusive conference held this past December on the Caribbean island of St. Martin.
While treatment has dramatically reduced illness and death from opportunistic infections, a growing body of evidence shows that even low-level HIV replication can wreak havoc throughout the body, perhaps by triggering chronic inflammation. This may explain higher rates of non-AIDS problems such as heart and liver disease in HIV-positive people, as well as what looks like accelerated aging.
"Current drugs are not a panacea," said Matt Sharp, Project Inform's director of treatment and prevention advocacy, who has survived on them for two decades. "Antiretroviral therapy has made HIV a chronic manageable disease, but it's still not a cure."
Part of the difficulty in finding a cure is that scientists do not yet fully understand the HIV lifecycle. Current antiretroviral drugs target specific steps in the viral replication process, but "what we're looking at now is much more complex," said Romas Geleziunas, a researcher at Gilead Sciences in Foster City, formerly with UCSF's Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology.
Companies like Gilead are starting to weigh the benefits of developing additional antiretroviral drugs versus looking for a cure. "We should do something cutting edge," said Geleziunas. "Let's go for the whole thing."
But some forum participants expressed skepticism that drug companies would put adequate resources into HIV eradication without pressure, considering that lifelong therapy may be more profitable than a one-time cure.
"We have seen within the drug industry that while there are scientists with great ideas, management sometimes quashes ideas due to competition with existing products or competing priorities," said AIDS Policy Project's Stephen LeBlanc.
