News (Updated
August 8, 2010)
[Home]
[Previous
news]
2010-08-03
BEIJING,
Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- China's Health Ministry Tuesday detailed a plan to fight
co-infection of HIV and tuberculosis (TB).
A ministry
circular to health authorities across China said tuberculosis infection had
become one of the leading causes of death among people living with HIV.
People
living with HIV whose immune systems were compromised by the virus are more
likely to contract TB, and even die of it.
The number
of cases of co-infection was still unknown.
The ministry
ordered HIV/AIDS prevention and control authorities nationwide and those
responsible for TB to step up cooperation in data sharing and testing.
The ministry
ordered free treatment and follow-up visits to patients co-infected with HIV and
TB once detected.
It required
HIV/AIDS prevention authorities to annually provide at least one TB examination
to people with HIV or AIDS patients.
TB
prevention authorities were required to persuade people infected with TB to
undergo HIV/AIDS tests.
The circular
said cases should be properly and confidentially recorded and filed in a
database and reported to government agencies, and also to keep the personal
information of such cases confidential.
China was
second to India in reported TB cases last year with 4.5 million. The World
Health Organization estimates China has approximately 1.3 million new cases
every year.
An estimated
700,000 people live with HIV in China, including about 75,000 AIDS patients.
In 2009,
China reported that AIDS had become the country's leading infectious disease
killer for the first time.
8/5/2010
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People over 50
with HIV are more likely to be diagnosed with late-stage disease than younger
adults, according to a British study.
They are also more than twice as likely to die
within a year of their HIV test as are younger people, even if they are
diagnosed late.
"We have a group of people who don't get
tested because they don't think they are at risk," said Dr. Valerie Delpech,
of the U.K. Health Protection Agency Center for Infections in London, who worked
on the study.
She said the number of HIV-infected Britons
has tripled over the past decade, reaching more than 55,000 in 2007. While older
adults account for only about one in six of these cases, the number of new
diagnoses is growing faster among those aged 50 and older.
"The numbers are still small," said
Delpech, whose findings appear in the journal AIDS; she estimated fewer than one
in 1,000 Britons were infected with HIV. But "everyone can be at risk, and
we need to think about that," Delpech said.
From 2000 to 2007, the number of newly
diagnosed people over 50 jumped from 299 to 710. Compared with their younger
peers, older people with HIV were more likely to be gay, white men.
"It wasn't all gay men," Delpech
stressed. "In fact, there were a large proportion of heterosexual men and
women."
Aug
5, 2010
NEW
YORK (Reuters Health) - Giving sex workers diaphragm contraceptives does not
seem to have the unintended effect of lowering their condom use, a new study
suggests.
The
study, which followed 140 female sex workers in Kenya, found that after the
women received diaphragms, along with counseling on condom use and safer-sex
practices, their sexual risk-taking declined over the next six months.
That
included an increase in the frequency of condom use and a dip in the number of
sex partners the women reported, according to researchers led by Dr. Maria F.
Gallo of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
At
the outset, the women reported using condoms 56 percent of the time, on average;
six months later, that figure was 68 percent. Their number of sex partners also
declined from an average of five over the previous two weeks, to four by the
study's end.
The
findings, reported in the American Journal of Epidemiology, may help allay
concerns that giving sex workers diaphragms could cause them to forgo condoms --
which are known to reduce the risk of HIV and other STDs.
Despite
the effectiveness of condoms, researchers are looking for additional ways to
curb the spread of HIV in areas like sub-Saharan Africa, where the AIDS epidemic
is most acute. That includes studying the usefulness of
"female-controlled" methods like the so-called female condom and
diaphragms, to help protect women whose partners will not use condoms.
In
theory, diaphragms could help keep the virus from reaching the cervix. And some
observational studies have found that women who use diaphragms have lower rates
of some STDs than women who do not use them, Gallo and her colleagues note.
However,
the only clinical trial conducted so far found that giving African women
diaphragms to use along with condoms had no effect on HIV transmission rates
compared with condoms alone.
That
study also found that women who received diaphragms had lower rates of condom
use than those given condoms only; over the study period, an average of 54
percent reported using a condom the last time they had sex, versus 85 percent of
the condoms-only group.
Those
researchers pointed out that lack of an increased HIV risk in the diaphragm
group -- despite their lower condom use -- warranted further research into
whether diaphragms themselves offer some protection.
Future
clinical trials, according to Gallo's team, should continue to look into whether
diaphragms can help curb HIV transmission. The current findings, they say,
suggest that giving women the contraceptives need not lower their use of
condoms.
The
researchers do acknowledge a number of limitations of the study, however. One is
that it focused on sex workers, and the results may not be generalizable to
other women. The study also relied on women's self-reported sexual practices,
which means at least some may have overestimated their condom use or
underestimated their number of sex partners.
In
the future, Gallo and her colleagues write, it would be helpful for studies to
try to verify condom use by testing women for objective markers of semen
exposure.
SOURCE:
link.reuters.com/kas53n
American Journal of Epidemiology, online July 26, 2010.