|
advertisement
|
Friday, July 23,
2004
CHICAGO (AP) — Illinois
last week became the first state with a law specifically
allowing HIV-positive people to donate organs to others
with the virus, but for anyone to actually use the state
law, federal rules will have to change. Currently,
organs from HIV-infected patients are discarded to
prevent them from being transplanted into uninfected
patients and spreading the virus that causes AIDS. But
those organs could prolong the lives of people who
already have HIV, many of whom are living longer because
of advances in medicine, said Dr. Patrick Lynch, a
hepatologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital who
helped write the legislation. “When those laws were
originally put on the books, they made sense. HIV was,
unfortunately, a death sentence back then,” Lynch said.
“That doesn’t make sense anymore.” But before
HIV-positive organ donations can be performed in
Illinois, officials will have to work with the United
Network for Organ Sharing — which coordinates the
nation’s organ transplant system under contract with the
government — to change U.S. Department of Health &
Human Services regulations that prohibit it.
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — Male
circumcision may have prevented HIV infection in some
cases but the evidence is still not strong enough to
make it a policy in the fight against AIDS, a leading
researcher said last week. Recent evidence from a study
in Uganda revealed that while no circumcised men in a
test group got infected after having sex with
HIV-positive women, nearly 17 percent who were not
circumcised got infected, said Quarraisha Abdool Karim,
an epidemiologist from University of Natal in South
Africa. Some studies suggest that the mucous lining of
the inner foreskin is more susceptible to HIV infection
than that of a woman’s cervix. At the same time, the
inner foreskin has glands that secrete an enzyme that
kills HIV, she told a plenary session at the
International AIDS Conference. She did not say how many
men were tested in the Uganda study.
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — Shouting
activists held up a speech last week by the top U.S.
official on AIDS when they massed in front of the
conference stage and tried to hand him a placard mocking
Washington’s policy on HIV. Randall Tobias, the U.S.
global AIDS coordinator, was at a podium to address the
15th International AIDS Conference but sat down to wait
out the minutes-long protest before launching his
speech, which drew near-constant heckling. “He’s lying,”
the protesters chanted. “People dying.” The placard
looked like a check for $15 billion — the amount the
U.S. government has pledged over five years to help curb
HIV and help its sufferers — but the check was made out
to pharmaceutical companies and “right-wing” extremists.
Conference organizers pleaded for calm, and the
protesters sat down facing the audience during the
speech. The activists say the U.S. funding comes with
too many strings — requiring some of it to go toward
programs emphasizing abstinence as the best policy
against HIV transmission even though most experts say
condoms are the best first line of defense.
NEW YORK (AP) — Black men between
the ages of 40 and 54 are nearly three times as likely
as other New Yorkers to have HIV or AIDS, according to a
new report by the New York City Department of Health
& Mental Hygiene. Only gay and bisexual men and
injecting drug users have higher rates of infection,
said the report released last week at the International
AIDS Conference in Bangkok, Thailand. Citywide, one of
every 14 middle-aged black men are infected with the
virus, the report found. In Manhattan alone, the
infection rate is one in seven. Many middle-aged black
men are not being tested in the early stages of
infection and do not know they need treatment, the
report said.
NEW
YORK — Researchers released a study on the
effects the popular gay party drug crystal
methamphetamine has on the brain and it was worse than
scientists expected to find, according to the New York
Times. The first high-resolution MRI study of
methamphetamine addicts shows a “forest fire of brain
damage,” said Dr. Paul Thompson, an expert on brain
mapping at the University of California Los Angeles. “We
expected some brain changes but didn’t expect so much
tissue to be destroyed.” The study, published in the
June 30 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, shows the
brain’s surface and deeper limbic system. The portion of
the brain involved in drug craving, reward, mood and
emotion lost 11 percent of its tissue, according to the
Times. “The cells are dead and gone,” Thompson said. The
study looked at 22 people in their 30s who had used the
drug for at least 10 years and a control group. The
addicts averaged weekly four grams of the drug, which is
popular among gay club-goers, and had been high for 19
of the previous 30 days before testing began, the Times
reported.
|
