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The US Senate Aging Committee heard testimony on September 18, the sixth annual National HIV/AIDS and Aging Awareness Day, from five witnesses testifying about the challenges facing aging HIV-infected people. Witnesses noted that states with large aging HIV-infected populations experienced greater impact than other states. According to Kenneth Miller, executive director of Maine’s Down East AIDS Network, older HIV-infected people who lived in rural areas faced complicated health issues, including lack of access to medical care and mental health treatment.
Miller stated that older, rural patients also isolated themselves because of stigma against those who were gay and had HIV. Other difficulties specific to rural HIV-infected people included transportation to physician’s appointments and lack of access to social support networks. Miller recommended ways to improve the system of care, including awareness and outreach. He advised that this population was vulnerable to depression and might not have access to mental health screening and care.
Although treatment advances had extended life expectancy for HIV patients, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) cautioned older Americans not to stereotype HIV as a young person’s disease. Older Americans also were vulnerable to HIV and should “exercise the same kind of care” if they were engaging in high-risk behaviors.
Lack of TB case reporting by private hospitals in parts of India could affect efficiency in fighting the disease, according to health officials. Hospitals must report all TB diagnoses, per a 2012 government order by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, but private institutions worried about data security and losing patients. The reluctance to report all TB cases affect data collection, which then could alter the structure of policies to combat the disease, said M. Sakthivel, deputy director of medical services (TB).
The Government of India provided assistance to all patients with multi-drug resistant TB whether they received treatment at government or private hospital. A government-developed application collected diagnosis reports to provide immediate surveillance of TB cases. Private hospitals then could send case details through other channels of communications.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated India’s TB rate at 203 out of 1,000,000 people. According to Indian officials, the major city of Ciombatore should report between 7,100 and 7,300 cases per year, but they were reporting only 2,430 cases annually. Of 400 district hospitals, fewer than 10 percent reported TB cases on a consistent basis, Sakthivel told a local news organization.
Scientists researching a cure for HIV have projected that a cure could be available in 18 to 24 months. The researchers were working on two natural compounds––prostatin and bryostatin––that they reproduced in the laboratory for medical purposes. Prostratin comes from the bark of the Samoan mamala tree. Paul Cox, an ethnobotanist and director of the Institute of Ethnomedicine in Wyoming, heard of the bark from a Samoan healer. Paul Wender, a chemist from California’s Stanford University, found in experiments with prostratin that it flushed out the virus from cells where it was hiding. Drugs are able to kill the virus when it is in the open, but not when it is hiding in cells. When patients stopped taking their medication, the virus resurfaced and quickly multiplied.
Wender was able to recreate the drug and design new variants and has made it 100 times more powerful than that obtained from the tree. The AIDS Research Alliance (ARA), a Los Angeles nonprofit dedicated to finding a cure for AIDS, is developing prostratin. Dr. Stephen Brown, medical director of ARA, stated that the organization was two thirds of the way through necessary experiments before the drug would be ready for market. Researchers had performed initial tests on animals and now were conducting tests on blood from AIDS patients who had been on immunosuppressive therapy.
Bryostatin, a compound that comes from a sea creature called bryozoa, also has healing qualities. It was discovered by Robert Pettit, a University of Arizona chemistry professor. Wender created bryostatin variants 1,000 times more powerful at flushing HIV from cells than prostratin. However, additional work is necessary before it could be considered a successful drug candidate.
The National Institutes of Health is helping to fund Wender’s research.
The study was presented before the 246th American Chemical Society National Meeting, September 8–12, in Indianapolis, Ind.
The Oklahoma State Department of Health and the Tulsa Health Department reported the first documented instance of patient-to-patient hepatitis C transmission in a Tulsa dentist’s practice. On March 28, the health departments notified thousands of the dentist’s former patients of potential hepatitis C exposure at the dentist’s Tulsa and Owasso offices and recommended the patients have hepatitis C testing at free clinics. After the notification, 4,202 former patients had free hepatitis screening and others had testing at private clinics. The testing identified 89 former patients with hepatitis C, five with hepatitis B, and four with HIV.
State Epidemiologist Dr. Kristy Bradley stated that CDC conducted genetic-based testing of patient specimens to confirm the single instance of patient-to-patient transmission. Officials had expected that testing would diagnose some cases of hepatitis C, hepatitis B, and HIV among the dentist’s patients, based on overall US prevalence rates. Bradley emphasized that US dental procedures generally were safe, but the hepatitis C transmission incident emphasized the importance of strict infection control procedures in dental practices.
Tulsa County District Attorney Tim Harris stated that the dentist was unlikely to face criminal charges because the state would have to prove the dentist “knowingly caused” the hepatitis C transmission from patient to patient.
After identifying five cases of hepatitis A at a Japanese restaurant in the Bronx, health officials encouraged all customers who ate recently at the restaurant to get vaccinated. On September 20, officials said that one employee and four customers of the New Hawaii Sea restaurant on Williamsbridge Road tested positive for the virus, and they asked that anyone who ate in the restaurant or who ordered delivery or catering from the business between September 7 and September 19 be vaccinated immediately. The restaurant’s owners have been cooperative and voluntarily closed the restaurant until all its employees could be vaccinated. The Public Health Department began offering vaccinations at Herbert Lehman High School on September 21.
In response to a rise in syphilis rates in Broward County, Fla., health officials mailed 22,000 notices last week to encourage residents to get tested. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest US AIDS organization, distributed the flyers. Albert Ruiz, director of AHF’s public health division, said that although Broward County had the highest syphilis rate in the state, the county was contending with a curable disease, especially if caught and treated early. Since 2000, the county had seen a 400-percent increase in reported cases, and according to the Florida Department of Health, the county reported 613 cases in 2012. Within the first 10 days of sending out the flyers, six residents had sought out syphilis screenings at the AHF Broward Wellness Center. The center opened on September 3 and offers free testing and treatment for syphilis, HIV, chlamydia, and gonorrhea.
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