New research reported in the journal CHEST shows that prescription sleep aids may do little to improve the use of continuous positive airway pressure among patients with obstructive sleep apnea. The study found that patients with OSA who were given prescription sleep aids were no more likely to use their CPAP machines than patients with OSA taking a placebo.
The key to combating AIDS in Russia may be to treat HIV-infected drug users. A new model estimating the spread of HIV in Russia suggests that treating injection drug users with antiretroviral medication will slow transmission of the virus among the general population.
UNICEF is distressed by the extraordinary violence in northern Gaza. Since 1 November, we estimate that 68 Palestinians have been killed, including 14 children. The deaths during the last seven days, including the children killed in today’s shelling, add to the steady deadly toll on Palestinian children since the Intifada broke out in 2000, with 113 children killed so far this year. This is more than double the total figure for 2005.
The Tamil Nadu government’s health department had declared Chikungunya as a ‘notifiable disease’ under the public health Act, 1939.
Antiretroviral therapy can keep HIV infection in check and delay and ameliorate the symptoms of HIV/AIDS. However, the drugs do not manage to eradicate the virus completely; individuals have to stay on the drugs permanently. Preclinical studies in mice by Ekatarina Dadachova and colleagues (Albert Einstein College of Medicine) published in the international open-access journal PLoS Medicine now suggest a new strategy to locate and kill many if not all HIV-infected cells in the body.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered how the Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) subverts a normal cell process in order to promote tumor growth. The finding, published in the most recent issue of PLoS Pathogens, offers new potential strategies for treating Kaposi’s sarcoma and other cancers associated with viruses
Tennis star urges women and children to use bed nets. On her first trip to Africa, tennis great Serena Williams called on all children and pregnant women in Ghana to protect themselves from the killer disease malaria by consistently sleeping under bed nets.
Bringing hope to hundreds of children in one of the countries hardest hit by HIV/AIDS, the Abbott Fund, Baylor College of Medicine and the Government of Malawi have joined forces to build the country’s first pediatric HIV clinic. The First Lady of Malawi, Madame Ethel Zvauya Mutharika and other dignitaries at Kamuzu Central Hospital officially opened the new clinic today in the city of Lilongwe.
How well an individual’s immune system controls HIV during the earliest phases of infection appears to depend on both the specific versions of key immune-system molecules called HLA Class I that have been inherited, as well as on the fragments of viral protein those molecules display to the T lymphocytes that usually destroy infected cells. In a report in the November issue of PLOS Medicine, researchers from the Partners AIDS Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital (PARC/MGH) report that specific HLA Class I/HIV viral fragment combinations are associated with a more powerful antiviral response, findings that may help develop vaccines against HIV.
A groundbreaking study, which provides the first ever comprehensive analysis of sexual behaviour around the world, is published today in the Lancet, as part of a major series on sexual and reproductive health.