By Beatrice Jeschek

Scanning electron micrograph of HIV-1 budding (in green) from cultured lymphocyte © CDC

For the first time, a study of gay men has demonstrated that an anti-HIV pill can protect uninfected people from contracting the AIDS virus through sex.

The results were published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The results show that an already approved drug, Truvada, can halve transmission rates. This could provide a powerful new tool to curb the AIDS epidemic.

“The end of AIDS is no longer a dream, it’s in sight,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of the New York-based AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, quoted in Businessweek. “We have tools that when combined are going to allow us to break the back of the epidemic.”

Robert Grant, a virologist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), headed the study, which involved gay men aged 18 to 67 in Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, the United States, Thailand, and South Africa.

But Grant emphasizes, according to ScienceNOW, that the findings only apply to men and transgender women who have sex with men; other studies are underway to evaluate PrEP in heterosexual men and women and injecting drug users, he said.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned in a media statement that condoms remain the best way to avoid infection.

The results

As reported online today in The New England Journal of Medicine, the strategy, called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, was tested in 2499 HIV uninfected men and transgender women who have sex with men. Half of the group received a placebo.

In the treatment group, transmission dropped by 44%, despite the fact that many study participants in the trial frequently skipped doses. When the researchers analysed a small subset of people who received the treatment and not the placebo, they found a 72% protection rate in people who took the drug regularly.

Nearly 30 large-scale HIV prevention studies have failed, making these results much more heartening. The new study had cost $43.6 million and was conducted in six countries between July 2007 and December 2009.

Funding

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) provided two-thirds of the funding for the study, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation covered the other third.

Trial in South African women

The results come on the heels of a widely celebrated positive finding from a trial in South African women, which this summer reported that a vaginal gel laced with tenofovir reduced infection by 39%. According to experts, this means that antiviral chemo prevention works.

Truvada drug for prescription

The Truvada drug (developed by Gilead Sciences) is a popular anti-HIV treatment, and can be prescribed for "off-label use" by any physician. But it remains unclear whether insurance companies will pay for this off-label use; costs run from $11 per month for a generic version to nearly $1000 per month for the product.

Ethical issues

Researchers caution that no single preventive by itself can stop HIV, which infects people by different routes under a wide variety of conditions. It, however, appears quite clearly that the most potent tools we have right now are drugs.

This article was first published 23/11/2010 on maltastar.com.

By Beatrice Jeschek
More than two hundred children have been exposed to lead dust and died of poisoning in northern Nigeria. They had worked as child laborers in gold mines.

The UN office for the Organization of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) yesterday reported about the deaths of several hundred people since the beginning of this year in the northern Nigerian state of Zamfara. More than 300 people have died from lead poisoning, two-thirds of them children.

“These poisonings are due to traditional gold-prospecting methods”, said Elisabeth Byrs, OCHA spokeswoman in Geneva. A further 18.000 individuals may be affected, she added.

In Nigeria, small amounts of gold are extracted from lead-rich ores. In order to extract the gold, the lead is crushed and dried. Consequentially, the resulting dust contains deadly amounts of lead, which contaminates tools, earth and water the workers use.

The Nigerian authorities have stopped the work in illegal gold mines and started the evacuation of some of the contaminated areas.

A five-member team of environmental emergency specialists arrived on Monday in Abuja, the capital.

According to the UN News Center, the team will spend several weeks taking samples of soil and drinking water and analyzing them. One of their tasks will also be to devise recommendations on how to clean up pollution from lead, mercury and copper.

This article was first published 22/09/2010 on maltastar.com.

By Beatrice Jeschek

This article was first published 17/09/2010 on maltastar.com.

By Beatrice Jeschek
Malignant melanoma is considered to be the most dangerous type of skin cancer. A genetically targeted drug promises now to slow the progress.

Those diagnosed with advanced melanoma usually die within a year. New hope for patients lies on a brand new drug which prevents the mutated B-RAF gene from generating cancerous cell growth. This very fact promises to be a breakthrough in skin cancer therapy.

A study published last week in Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine describes the structure of this experimental new drug PLX 4032 developed by the US biotechnology company Plexxikon based in Berkeley, California.

It is still so new that it does not have a proper name yet. However, a BBC blogger asks already confidently if this might be “cancer’s penicillin moment”.

The number of those tested is small, and the trials of the drug are still in phase one. Nevertheless, 24 out of 32 participants could reduce the size of their tumours by 30 percent. In two people the tumour even disappeared entirely.

This means, a former incurable disease form turns out to be curable thanks to great new insight in gene sequencing which allows to compare healthy and diseased cells.

This new insight in genetics might indeed create “cancer’s penicillin moment” to be used also for other forms of cancer therapy.

This article was first published 16/09/2010 on maltastar.com.

By Beatrice Jeschek

'cdc e-health' via flickr

What connects Y2K and swine flu? Beatrice Jeschek delivers thoughts about having risk for breakfast and the morality behind reporting it.

There might be no war in risk reporting, but there is a shooting behind every risk. I call it the moral shooting in risk reporting.

True, the quality of risks can differ a lot. It is nevertheless quite astonishing that a computer software problem can lead to religious assumptions about God’s punishment of mankind, who ironically created this risk itself.

So, the core of a factual risk appears every time again in its moral twin. It is fed by people’s fear and the elitist evaluation of it. If we want to, we can have our daily risk for breakfast.

An advantage in reporting the present of swine flu (and its vaccine) lies in the possibility to reflect about communicating it. Then, the swine flu scare is not only about the facts behind health care risk. It becomes a question about the structures and fears that lie behind it.

This article was first published 20/01/2010 on thekosmo.org.