Last week, 24 new members were inducted into the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA).
This governmental advisory board provides council to the President and the serving Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding national and international HIV/AIDS policy.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius selected new council members for their expertise on or experience with HIV/AIDS matters.
Past members have included research scientists, pharmaceutical company directors, HIV patients, testing counselors, public health officials, activists, and non-profit organization leaders.
This meeting was PACHA’s first under the Barack Obama administration.
“These new members…represent the…
According to a recently published study in PLoS One, HIV-positive women who are receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) are twice as likely to become pregnant as those not receiving ART.
The study was conducted among Sub-Saharan African women who were enrolled in the Mother-to-Child Transmission-Plus (MTCT-Plus) Initiative, which is an HIV treatment program for women and children.
Of the 4,531 women studied, 589 pregnancies were recorded, where 244 pregnancies occurred among women not receiving ART and 345 pregnancies among women receiving ART.
The researchers of this study wanted to explore this topic…
Researchers studying child development in Ukraine have found that quality of care in an orphanage or family setting has a greater impact on children’s physical growth and cognitive development than does the impact of having HIV.
HIV infection, institutional care, and family adversities are related to slow physical growth and lower cognitive performance. This study sought to determine which factors had a greater impact on children.
Dr. Natasha A. Dobrova-Krol and colleagues at the Centre for Child and Family Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands observed 64 children. Of those chosen…
Last week in their Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gave the latest statistics on racial and ethnic discrepancies among children diagnosed with perinatal HIV infection. Perinatal HIV infection is any form of HIV transmission from mother to child during pregnancy, labor, delivery, and breastfeeding.
Despite significant progress in other areas of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, studies are still reporting the majority of new perinatal infections to be among African Americans, seconded by Hispanics/Latinos.
This statistic is reflected in the latest data on perinatal HIV infections…
A study being conducted at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing by Jason Farley, an assistant professor, will evaluate physicians‘ ability to prevent cardiovascular conditions in HIV/AIDS patients.
For his study, Farley plans to evaluate physicians based on their counseling sessions with HIV/AIDS patients, specifically looking at the health advice patients receive regarding diet, exercise, and smoking.
“The question of the study is: How good are we at preventing cardiovascular conditions when we have another life-threatening condition we’re paying attention to?” Farley explained in The John Hopkins University Gazette.
Farley’s study also will…