NAIROBINews (Updated October
9, 2011)
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04 Oct 2011
By Katy Migiro
NAIROBI
Hormone injections used
every three months, like Depo Provera, are the most popular form of
contraceptive in east and southern
Unlike the daily
contraceptive pill, it is easier for women to take them without men’s
knowledge.
The study also showed that
men are twice as likely to become infected if their HIV positive female partners
are using injectables rather than no contraception.
“The best contraception
today is injectable hormonal contraception because you don’t need a doctor,
it’s long-lasting, it enables women to control timing and spacing of birth
without a lot of fuss and travel,” Isobel Coleman, director of the women and
foreign policy programme at the Council on Foreign Relations told the New York
Times
“If it is now proven
that these contraceptions are helping spread the AIDS epidemic, we have a major
health crisis on our hands.”
The researchers studied
3,800 couples in Kenya Botswana,
The World Health
Organization will meet in January to discuss the findings.
(AFP) – 4 October, 2011
The research was carried
out among 3,790 heterosexual couples in
The findings, if
confirmed, could have huge repercussions for policies on contraception and HIV
prevention.
The authors say it
strengthens the need for safe-sex messages, in which the condom is promoted as a
shield against the AIDS pathogen.
The couples were monitored
for an average of 18 months during which 167 individuals became infected, 73 of
them women, according to the paper appearing in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Transcribed into a
benchmark of prevalence, HIV transmissions were 6.61 per 100 person-years in
couples where women used hormonal contraception, compared to 3.78 per 100
person-years among those who did not.
Rates of infection from
women to men were 2.61 per 100 person-years among women who used hormonal
contraception, but 1.51 per 100 person-years among those who did not.
Most of the women who took
hormone contraceptives used an injectable, long-lasting form such as the
Depo-Provera shot. Only a small number used the Pill; in this group, there was
an increase in HIV risk but not big enough to be conclusive.
Over the last two decades,
scientists have launched several investigations into whether hormonal
contraceptive use affects HIV risk, but the probes have returned conflicting
results.
This is the first
large-scale study, using an ambitious design, to return clear proof of the risk.
It is also the first to highlight an apparent risk to men.
The investigators noted
that women who took injectable contraceptives had "raised
concentrations" of HIV genetic material in their cervical secretions.
If this is a mechanism for
handing on the virus to men, further work is urgently needed to test the theory,
they said.
In practical terms,
doctors should advise women of the potentially increased risk and warn them of
"dual protection" with condoms, says the probe, led by Renee Heffron
of the
The study was conducted
between 2004 and 2010 in
In a commentary also
carried by the journal, clinical scientist Charles Morrison spoke of a
"tragic" dilemma.
Promoting hormonal birth
control in
"The time to provide
a more definitive answer to this critical public health question is now,"
through a randomised trial of volunteers, he wrote.
In 2009, more than 33
million people were living with HIV and 2.6 million people became newly
infected, according to figures released last year by UNAIDS.
Copyright © 2011 AFP.
04 Oct 2011
Source: Content partner //
SciDev.Net - Pablo Correa
Colombian scientists will
harnesses the calculation potential of the almost two million computers that
make up the World Community Grid, funded by the IBM Corporation.
The project will use an
existing open-access database of 13 million drugs to find those that can destroy
or inactivate some of the leishmaniasis parasite's 53 proteins. Scientists will
concentrate on 600,000 candidates, which have been shortlisted.
Carlos Muskus, the project
leader at the
Muskus said that promising
drug candidates would undergo a series of tests, before clinical trials and
eventual release as a treatment.
Mauricio Hernandez, a
bioinformatics expert at the same university, said the work is pioneering in
The World Community Grid
is searching for drugs for other diseases, including dengue and HIV/AIDS. Anyone
can join, and members of the community can choose the project they want to
support.
There are several similar
initiatives around, such as Wide In Silico Docking On Malaria (WISDOM), which
uses grid computing to analyze the proteins of the malaria parasite.
Mauricio Rodriguez,
director of the National Biotechnology Program and coordinator of the
Bioinformatics Center that is being created in Colombia, said that computational
biology is enabling researchers to "set [their] foot on the accelerator of
knowledge", especially in developing countries.
But Stanley Watowich, an
associate professor at the
Watowich said that only
2–5 per cent of the network's users are willing to let their computers conduct
large calculations that can slow down their machines. It is mainly the
involvement of clusters at universities and institutes that can take the
workload.
"We need to work out
how to divide these calculations into smaller pieces that will not slow
individual computers down too much."
Watowich added that the
current process focuses on looking at the interactions between two proteins.
This can be processed by a computer in a matter of minutes, but he warned that
it is an over-simplification of the interaction and can lead to the
identification of many unsuitable drug candidates.
"The current process
works well but it also gives a lot of false positives," he said.
Additional reporting by
Jan Piotrowski.