Globally more than 30 million people are infected with HIV

University of Michigan scientists have identified a new reservoir for hidden HIV-infected cells that can serve as a factory for new infections. The findings, which appear online March 7 in Nature Medicine, indicate a new target for curing the disease so those infected with the virus may someday no longer rely on AIDS drugs for a lifetime. "Antiviral drugs have been effective at keeping the virus at bay. However once the drug therapy is stopped, the virus comes back," says senior author of the study Kathleen L. Collins, MD, Ph.D., associate professor of both internal medicine and microbiology and immunology at the U-M Medical School. In people infected with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), the virus that causes AIDS, there's an unsolved problem with current antiviral drugs. Though lifesaving, they cannot root the virus out of the body. Infected cells are able to live on, undetected by the immune system, and provide the machinery for the virus to reproduce and spread. Important new research by U-M has discovered that bone marrow, previously thought to be resistant to the virus, can contain latent forms of the infection. "This finding is important because it helps explain why it's hard to cure the disease," Collins says. "Ultimately to cure this disease, we're going to have to develop specific strategies aimed at targeting these latently infected cells." "Currently people have to take antiviral drugs for their entire life to control the infection," she says. "It would be easier to treat this disease in countries that don't have the same resources as we do with a course of therapy for a few months, or even years. But based on what we know now people have to stay on drugs for their entire life." Using tissue samples, U-M researchers detected HIV genomes in bone marrow isolated from people effectively treated with antiviral drugs for more than six months. While further studies are needed to demonstrate that stem cells can harbor the HIV virus, the study results confirm that HIV targets some long-lived progenitor cells, young cells that have not fully developed but mature into cells with special immune functions. When active infection occurs the toxic effects of the virus kill the cell even as the newly made viral particles spread the infection to new target cells. "Our finding that HIV infects these cells has clear ramifications for HIV disease because some of these cells may be long-lived and could carry latent HIV for extended periods of time," she says. "These HIV cell reservoirs can be induced to generate new infections." The new research gives a broader view of how HIV overwhelms the body's immune system and devastates its ability to regenerate itself. Globally more than 30 million people are infected with HIV, including millions of children. Improvements have been made since the 1990s in the way the disease is treated that has led to an 85 percent to 90 percent reduction in mortality. "Drugs now available are effective at treating the virus, making HIV more of a chronic disease than a death sentence," Collins says. "This has made a huge impact in quality of life, however only 40 percent of people worldwide are receiving anti-viral drugs and unfortunately that means that not everybody is benefiting."




http://www.hivplusmag.com/NewsStory.asp?id=21870&StoryDate=03/09/2010

Fear of anthrax infection.People Want the Drug Cipro

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson asked Americans not to buy and hoard the pharmaceuticals, although there is some controversy over whether the country has enough drugs on hand. Claude Allen, HHS deputy secretary, told the House Committee on Veterans Affairs that part of $1.5 billion the department has requested, would be used to increase the pharmaceutical stockpile of anthrax treatment. The $1 billion-a-year drug, manufactured by German drugmaker Bayer AG, has been used in the United States since 1987 to treat a variety of infections. The Food and Drug Administration approved it for anthrax treatment last year. Fear of anthrax infection has taken hold across the country and even in Europe where several recent scares have been reported. People Want the Drug Dr. Daisy Merey, who runs a family practice in West Palm Beach, said she prescribed Cipro for several people who wanted it around just in case they got sick. "A lot of people who are coming in for checkups are also asking about Cipro," Merey told Reuters. "We don't recommend taking antibiotics as a preventive measure because there are side effects. If people really want it just to have in case something happens, we'll prescribe it to them." One reason doctors don't like to have people procuring prescriptions for Cipro online is that it's a very strong antibiotic that is generally reserved for tough cases, said Dr. Nancy Snyderman on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "It's not even a first-line drug of choice for most infections," Snyderman said. "This is a kind of medication you use when other things fail." Since anthrax doesn't widely disperse itself, there is no need to stock up on Cipro, said Stephen Ostroff, chief epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. "And in all of the current situations that we're aware of, it's really mostly been confined to people who've had direct contact with these contaminated envelopes," Ostroff told Good Morning America.




Related antibiotics

Amoxicillin Trimox Adoxa Zithromax AUGMENTIN Bactrim Myambutol E-mycin

Reduce the risks of high blood pressure and heart failure

Sticking with a healthy diet and lifestyle can reduce the risks of high blood pressure and heart failure, in which the heart cannot pump enough blood to supply the body with oxygen and nutrients, according to the findings of two studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In the first investigation, Dr. Luc Djousse, from Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues analyzed data from 20,900 men in the Physicians' Health Study I (1982-2008) to assess the link between lifestyle factors and the lifetime risk of heart failure. The subjects were followed for 22.4 years, on average.

The lifetime risk of heart failure, assessed at age 40 years, was about one in seven, the report indicates.

A variety of healthy lifestyle habits were linked to a lower risk of heart failure. These habits included maintaining a normal body weight , not smoking , regular exercise, moderate alcohol intake, consumption of breakfast cereals, and consumption of fruits and vegetables.

Men who adhered to none of the healthy lifestyle factors had the highest lifetime risk of heart failure-21.2 percent--while those who adhered to four or more had the lowest risk-10.1 percent.

The second investigation, conducted by Dr. John P. Forman and colleagues, from Harvard Medical School, Boston, involved an analysis of data from 83,882 women in the Nurses' Health Study (1991-2005). The goal was to assess the impact that various diet and lifestyle factors had, in combination, on the risk of high blood pressure.

The study focused on six factors, previously tied to a reduced risk of high blood pressure: normal body weight, vigorous exercise for an average of 30 minutes per day, consuming a healthy diet, modest alcohol intake, use of pain medications less than once per week, and use of supplemental folic acid, a form of vitamin B .

The presence of 6, 5, 4, and 3 of the factors cut the risk of high blood pressure by 78, 72, 58, and 54 percent, respectively, relative to the complete absence of these factors.

The factor with the single greatest impact on high blood pressure was body weight. Women who were obese were 4.7-times more likely to develop high blood pressure than were women of normal body weight.

The authors conclude that many new cases of high blood pressure could be prevented through adherence to the low-risk dietary and lifestyle factors described. This, they add, could yield major public health benefits.

SOURCE: Journal of the American Medical Association, July 22/29, 2009.