Terms of Reference for Developing a Branding Strategy for the MENA Coalition on HIV and Harm Reduction Click here to download the TOR
A High-Level Failure for the United Nations on Key Populations
25 million transgender people experience difficulties in accessing services that can help them feel supported and keep them both physically and mentally healthy, according to a landmark Lancet series on transgender health.
Millions of people living with HIV-AIDS will finally have access to Equality Courts to fight stigmatisation and discrimination on the basis of being infected with the virus in South Africa
Daily treatment with the antiviral drug tenofovir during the third trimester of pregnancy reduced the mother-to-child transmission rate of hepatitis B (HBV) from 18% to 5%, according to the findings of a clinical trial led by researchers from NYU Langone Medical Center and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Women living in world regions where HIV infection is common are at high risk of acquiring HIV infection during pregnancy and the postpartum period, according to a study by US researchers published in this week\'s PLOS Medicine.
Alison Drake and colleagues from the University of Washington in Seattle also found that mothers who acquire HIV during pregnancy or postpartum are more likely to pass the infection on to their offspring than mothers with chronic HIV infections.
The authors reached these conclusions by reviewing relevant published studies and then using a model to estimate the HIV incidence rate and the association between pregnancy and postpartum status, HIV incidence and the risk and rates of mother to child transmission (MTCT).
The authors found that the combined HIV incidence rate among pregnant/postpartum women was 3.8/100 person-years. Furthermore, the number of new infections per number of people at risk was significantly higher in African countries than in non-African countries at 3.6% and 0.3%, respectively. The authors also found that among African women, the risk of MTCT was 2.9-fold higher during the postpartum period among those who had recently acquired HIV than among those with chronic HIV infection, and 2.3-fold higher during the pregnancy/postpartum periods combined.
Although limited by differences in the quality of the studies included in this review, these findings have important implications: they suggest that women living in regions where HIV infection is common should be offered repeat HIV testing during pregnancy and in the postpartum period to detect incident HIV infections, and that preventing HIV transmission during pregnancy and the postpartum period should be prioritized, for example, by counseling women about the need to use condoms to prevent transmission during this period of their lives.
The authors say: \"Detection and prevention of incident HIV in pregnancy/postpartum should be prioritized, and is critical to decrease [mother to child transmission].\"
Adolescents newly diagnosed with HIV need to be rapidly incorporated into HIV care networks to have the best chances of remaining in care in the long term, research from the United States published in the June 1st edition of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes shows.
The past decade has delivered major advances to reduce the burden of tuberculosis (TB) among HIV-positive individuals.
Thailand has become the first country in Asia to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV, meaning the rate of transmission has fallen below 2%.
Detecting HIV earlier, through screening programs that can identify the virus shortly after infection, may lead to lower rates of HIV transmission in local epidemics, suggest findings from a new study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases and available online.
