House of Numbers

Did science really cure the first case of HIV (aka AIDS)?

2011-02-07T01:38:00.000-06:00

Monday, February 07, 2011 by: Brent Leung

(NaturalNews) "The first and only person ever to be cured of HIV/AIDS is a leukemia patient treated in Berlin with HIV-resistant stem cells." This statement by Daniel J. DeNoon from WebMD comes in response to a paper published this month by the American Society of Hematology on an individual named Timothy Brown who was allegedly cured of HIV infection.

But was he the first to be cured of HIV?

In the 1990s, boxing heavyweight champion Tommy Morrison tested positive for HIV, according to the screening and confirmatory tests he took. He also sustained a viral load and maintained an antiretroviral regimen for a period of time. In 2007 he tested negative for HIV multiple times and was allowed to return to the ring.

Then a few years ago in South Africa, I spoke with doctors whose patients tested positive, but after taking natural medications for their HIV infection they then tested negative.

The multiple cases above are not isolated, as there is much testimony documented regarding scenarios where people who tested positive were later found to be negative. These instances beg the question of whether these individuals were cured of HIV. An equally important question is: were they ever even infected with HIV in the first place?

As shown in the film House of Numbers and in additional interviews taken for the film, the issues with HIV testing are enormous.

Watch: How Accurate is the HIV Confirmation Test
http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=E9FEA...

Before we can state that someone has been cured of HIV, I would like to see the scientific community come to a consensus on criteria for testing whether someone is infected with HIV. It is not plausible to determine if someone is cured unless it is proven that they are infected in the first place.

Another question that should be posed is why so much attention is being paid around the new study published by the American Society of Hematology when Luc Montagnier, the Nobel Laureate for discovering HIV, has already testified that it is possible for HIV to be cured naturally, without drugs.

See the interview with Luc Montagnier where he makes this earth shattering statement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQoN...

Intrigued by this study, I sent an inquiry to establishment scientists and The Perth Group for a comment. The Perth Group provided a brief response with a commitment to providing a full breakdown and response of the paper. The Perth Group writes:

"In the Subjects, Materials, and Methods Subjects section of this paper one reads: In February 2007, an HIV-infected patient underwent stem cell transplantation (SCT) due to a relapse of AML with a graft consisting of CCR5A32/A32 donor cells. The pre-transplant conditioning regimen included 100 mg/m2 of amsacrine, 30 mg/m2 of fludarabine, 2 g/m2 of cytarabine (day -12 until -9), 60 mg/kg of cyclophosphamide (days -4 and -3), 5.5 mg/kg of rabbit antithymocyte globuline (in three doses between day -3 and -1), and a 400 cGy total body irradiation (TBI; day -5). ART was discontinued on the day of transplantation, and 13 months later the patient received a second transplant with CCR5A32/A32 stem cells from the same donor due to a second relapse of AML. The conditioning regimen consisted of 100 mg/m2 of cytarabine (day -7 until day -1), 6 mg/m2 of gemtuzumab (day -7 and day -1), and a 200 cGy TBI (day -1)... Twelve months post-transplant, the patient underwent liver biopsy and histological examination confirmed GvHD grade I that was controlled with adaption of immunosuppressive therapy (cyclosporine A, methylprednisolone, mycophenolate mofetil)."

In other words, this particular patient received two transplants of foreign white blood cells, eight different drugs, anti-lymphocyte serum, and body irradiation, and had other drugs in the form of antiretroviral therapy, discontinued.

According to the title, all of this led to 'CURE OF HIV INFECTION BY CCR5A32/A32 SCT.' The administration of CCR5A32/A32 SCT constitutes only one part of a much larger experiment involving multiple drug and other therapies. All of these must be regarded as separate experiments, making it impossible to know exactly what 'cured the HIV infection.' If someone with hypertension is given multiple therapies, including non-pharmacological therapies, and blood pressure returns to normal, how can anyone say which treatment was responsible?

However, in order for the findings of the study to even have a valid platform for discussion, there must first be evidence that HIV exists. Until then, the question of whether someone can be cured of AIDS is moot.

Visit www.houseofnumbers.com to learn more about the HIV debate.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031232_HIV_cure.html#ixzz1DFwgVO5s

Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize Winner, Takes Homeopathy Seriously

2011-01-30T15:26:00.000-06:00

Dana Ullman

Dana Ullman, M.P.H. (Masters in Public Health, U.C. Berkeley) is "

Posted: January 30, 2011 11:49 AM

Dr. Luc Montagnier, the French virologist who won the Nobel Prize in 2008 for discovering the AIDS virus, has surprised the scientific community with his strong support for homeopathic medicine.
In a remarkable interview published in Science magazine of December 24, 2010, (1) Professor Luc Montagnier, has expressed support for the often maligned and misunderstood medical specialty of homeopathic medicine. Although homeopathy has persisted for 200+ years throughout the world and has been the leading alternative treatment method used by physicians in Europe, (2) most conventional physicians and scientists have expressed skepticism about its efficacy due to the extremely small doses of medicines used.

Most clinical research conducted on homeopathic medicines that has been published in peer-review journals have shown positive clinical results,(3, 4) especially in the treatment of respiratory allergies (5, 6), influenza, (7) fibromyalgia, (8, 9) rheumatoid arthritis, (10) childhood diarrhea, (11) post-surgical abdominal surgery recovery, (12) attention deficit disorder, (13) and reduction in the side effects of conventional cancer treatments. (14) In addition to clinical trials, several hundred basic science studies have confirmed the biological activity of homeopathic medicines. One type of basic science trials, called in vitro studies, found 67 experiments (1/3 of them replications) and nearly 3/4 of all replications were positive. (15, 16)

In addition to the wide variety of basic science evidence and clinical research, further evidence for homeopathy resides in the fact that they gained widespread popularity in the U.S. and Europe during the 19th century due to the impressive results people experienced in the treatment of epidemics that raged during that time, including cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, scarlet fever, and influenza.
Montagnier, who is also founder and president of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, asserted, "I can't say that homeopathy is right in everything. What I can say now is that the high dilutions (used in homeopathy) are right. High dilutions of something are not nothing. They are water structures which mimic the original molecules."

Here, Montagnier is making reference to his experimental research that confirms one of the controversial features of homeopathic medicine that uses doses of substances that undergo sequential dilution with vigorous shaking in-between each dilution. Although it is common for modern-day scientists to assume that none of the original molecules remain in solution, Montagnier's research (and other of many of his colleagues) has verified that electromagnetic signals of the original medicine remains in the water and has dramatic biological effects.

Montagnier has just taken a new position at Jiaotong University in Shanghai, China (this university is often referred to as "China's MIT"), where he will work in a new institute bearing his name. This work focuses on a new scientific movement at the crossroads of physics, biology, and medicine: the phenomenon of electromagnetic waves produced by DNA in water. He and his team will study both the theoretical basis and the possible applications in medicine.

Montagnier's new research is investigating the electromagnetic waves that he says emanate from the highly diluted DNA of various pathogens. Montagnier asserts, "What we have found is that DNA produces structural changes in water, which persist at very high dilutions, and which lead to resonant electromagnetic signals that we can measure. Not all DNA produces signals that we can detect with our device. The high-intensity signals come from bacterial and viral DNA."

Montagnier affirms that these new observations will lead to novel treatments for many common chronic diseases, including but not limited to autism, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and multiple sclerosis.

Montagnier first wrote about his findings in 2009, (17) and then, in mid-2010, he spoke at a prestigious meeting of fellow Nobelists where he expressed interest in homeopathy and the implications of this system of medicine. (18)

French retirement laws do not allow Montagnier, who is 78 years of age, to work at a public institute, thereby limiting access to research funding. Montagnier acknowledges that getting research funds from Big Pharma and certain other conventional research funding agencies is unlikely due to the atmosphere of antagonism to homeopathy and natural treatment options.

Support from Another Nobel Prize winner

Montagnier's new research evokes memories one of the most sensational stories in French science, often referred to as the 'Benveniste affair.' A highly respected immunologist Dr. Jacques Benveniste., who died in 2004, conducted a study which was replicated in three other university laboratories and that was published in Nature (19). Benveniste and other researchers used extremely diluted doses of substances that created an effect on a type of white blood cell called basophils.

Although Benveniste's work was supposedly debunked, (20) Montagnier considers Benveniste a "modern Galileo" who was far ahead of his day and time and who was attacked for investigating a medical and scientific subject that orthodoxy had mistakenly overlooked and even demonized.
In addition to Benveniste and Montagnier is the weighty opinion of Brian Josephson, Ph.D., who, like Montagnier, is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist.

Responding to an article on homeopathy in New Scientist, Josephson wrote:

Regarding your comments on claims made for homeopathy: criticisms centered around the vanishingly small number of solute molecules present in a solution after it has been repeatedly diluted are beside the point, since advocates of homeopathic remedies attribute their effects not to molecules present in the water, but to modifications of the water's structure.
Simple-minded analysis may suggest that water, being a fluid, cannot have a structure of the kind that such a picture would demand. But cases such as that of liquid crystals, which while flowing like an ordinary fluid can maintain an ordered structure over macroscopic distances, show the limitations of such ways of thinking. There have not, to the best of my knowledge, been any refutations of homeopathy that remain valid after this particular point is taken into account.

A related topic is the phenomenon, claimed by Jacques Benveniste's colleague Yolène Thomas and by others to be well established experimentally, known as "memory of water." If valid, this would be of greater significance than homeopathy itself, and it attests to the limited vision of the modern scientific community that, far from hastening to test such claims, the only response has been to dismiss them out of hand. (21)

Following his comments Josephson, who is an emeritus professor of Cambridge University in England, was asked by New Scientist editors how he became an advocate of unconventional ideas. He responded:

I went to a conference where the French immunologist Jacques Benveniste was talking for the first time about his discovery that water has a 'memory' of compounds that were once dissolved in it -- which might explain how homeopathy works. His findings provoked irrationally strong reactions from scientists, and I was struck by how badly he was treated. (22)

Josephson went on to describe how many scientists today suffer from "pathological disbelief;" that is, they maintain an unscientific attitude that is embodied by the statement "even if it were true I wouldn't believe it."
Even more recently, Josephson wryly responded to the chronic ignorance of homeopathy by its skeptics saying, "The idea that water can have a memory can be readily refuted by any one of a number of easily understood, invalid arguments."

In the new interview in Science, Montagnier also expressed real concern about the unscientific atmosphere that presently exists on certain unconventional subjects such as homeopathy, "I am told that some people have reproduced Benveniste's results, but they are afraid to publish it because of the intellectual terror from people who don't understand it."

Montagnier concluded the interview when asked if he is concerned that he is drifting into pseudoscience, he replied adamantly: "No, because it's not pseudoscience. It's not quackery. These are real phenomena which deserve further study."

The Misinformation That Skeptics Spread

It is remarkable enough that many skeptics of homeopathy actually say that there is "no research" that has shows that homeopathic medicines work. Such statements are clearly false, and yet, such assertions are common on the Internet and even in some peer-review articles. Just a little bit of searching can uncover many high quality studies that have been published in highly respected medical and scientific journals, including the Lancet, BMJ, Pediatrics, Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, Chest and many others. Although some of these same journals have also published research with negative results to homeopathy, there is simply much more research that shows a positive rather than negative effect.

Misstatements and misinformation on homeopathy are predictable because this system of medicine provides a viable and significant threat to economic interests in medicine, let alone to the very philosophy and worldview of biomedicine. It is therefore not surprising that the British Medical Association had the sheer audacity to refer to homeopathy as "witchcraft." It is quite predictable that when one goes on a witch hunt, one inevitable finds "witches," especially when there are certain benefits to demonizing a potential competitor (homeopathy plays a much larger and more competitive role in Europe than it does in the USA).

Skeptics of homeopathy also have long asserted that homeopathic medicines have "nothing" in them because they are diluted too much. However, new research conducted at the respected Indian Institutes of Technology has confirmed the presence of "nanoparticles" of the starting materials even at extremely high dilutions. Researchers have demonstrated by Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), electron diffraction and chemical analysis by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Atomic Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-AES), the presence of physical entities in these extreme dilutions. (24) In the light of this research, it can now be asserted that anyone who says or suggests that there is "nothing" in homeopathic medicines is either simply uninformed or is not being honest.

Because the researchers received confirmation of the existence of nanoparticles at two different homeopathic high potencies (30C and 200C) and because they tested four different medicines (Zincum met./zinc; Aurum met. /gold; Stannum met./tin; and Cuprum met./copper), the researchers concluded that this study provides "concrete evidence."

Although skeptics of homeopathy may assume that homeopathic doses are still too small to have any biological action, such assumptions have also been proven wrong. The multi-disciplinary field of small dose effects is called "hormesis," and approximately 1,000 studies from a wide variety of scientific specialties have confirmed significant and sometimes substantial biological effects from extremely small doses of certain substances on certain biological systems.

A special issue of the peer-review journal, Human and Experimental Toxicology (July 2010), devoted itself to the interface between hormesis and homeopathy. (25) The articles in this issue verify the power of homeopathic doses of various substances.

In closing, it should be noted that skepticism of any subject is important to the evolution of science and medicine. However, as noted above by Nobelist Brian Josephson, many scientists have a "pathological disbelief" in certain subjects that ultimately create an unhealthy and unscientific attitude blocks real truth and real science. Skepticism is at its best when its advocates do not try to cut off research or close down conversation of a subject but instead explore possible new (or old) ways to understand and verify strange but compelling phenomena. We all have this challenge as we explore and evaluate the biological and clinical effects of homeopathic medicines.

REFERENCES:
(1) Enserink M, Newsmaker Interview: Luc Montagnier, French Nobelist Escapes "Intellectual Terror" to Pursue Radical Ideas in China. Science 24 December 2010: Vol. 330 no. 6012 p. 1732. DOI: 10.1126/science.330.6012.1732
(2) Ullman D. Homeopathic Medicine: Europe's #1 Alternative for Doctors. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-ullman/homeopathic-medicine-euro_b_402490.html
(3) Linde L, Clausius N, Ramirez G, et al., "Are the Clinical Effects of Homoeopathy Placebo Effects? A Meta-analysis of Placebo-Controlled Trials," Lancet, September 20, 1997, 350:834-843.
(4) Lüdtke R, Rutten ALB. The conclusions on the effectiveness of homeopathy highly depend on the set of analyzed trials. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. October 2008. doi: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2008.06/015.
(5) Taylor, MA, Reilly, D, Llewellyn-Jones, RH, et al., Randomised controlled trial of homoeopathy versus placebo in perennial allergic rhinitis with overview of four trial Series, BMJ, August 19, 2000, 321:471-476.
(6) Ullman, D, Frass, M. A Review of Homeopathic Research in the Treatment of Respiratory Allergies. Alternative Medicine Review. 2010:15,1:48-58. http://www.thorne.com/altmedrev/.fulltext/15/1/48.pdf
(7) Vickers AJ. Homoeopathic Oscillococcinum for preventing and treating influenza and influenza-like syndromes. Cochrane Reviews. 2009.
(8) Bell IR, Lewis II DA, Brooks AJ, et al. Improved clinical status in fibromyalgia patients treated with individualized homeopathic remedies versus placebo, Rheumatology. 2004:1111-5.
(9) Fisher P, Greenwood A, Huskisson EC, et al., "Effect of Homoeopathic Treatment on Fibrositis (Primary Fibromyalgia)," BMJ, 299(August 5, 1989):365-6.
(10) Jonas, WB, Linde, Klaus, and Ramirez, Gilbert, "Homeopathy and Rheumatic Disease," Rheumatic Disease Clinics of North America, February 2000,1:117-123.
(11) Jacobs J, Jonas WB, Jimenez-Perez M, Crothers D, Homeopathy for Childhood Diarrhea: Combined Results and Metaanalysis from Three Randomized, Controlled Clinical Trials, Pediatr Infect Dis J, 2003;22:229-34.
(12) Barnes, J, Resch, KL, Ernst, E, "Homeopathy for Post-Operative Ileus: A Meta-Analysis," Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology, 1997, 25: 628-633.
(13) M, Thurneysen A. Homeopathic treatment of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a randomised, double blind, placebo controlled crossover trial. Eur J Pediatr. 2005 Dec;164(12):758-67. Epub 2005 Jul 27.
(14) Kassab S, Cummings M, Berkovitz S, van Haselen R, Fisher P. Homeopathic medicines for adverse effects of cancer treatments. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2009, Issue 2.
(15) Witt CM, Bluth M, Albrecht H, Weisshuhn TE, Baumgartner S, Willich SN. The in vitro evidence for an effect of high homeopathic potencies--a systematic review of the literature. Complement Ther Med. 2007 Jun;15(2):128-38. Epub 2007 Mar 28.
(16) Endler PC, Thieves K, Reich C, Matthiessen P, Bonamin L, Scherr C, Baumgartner S. Repetitions of fundamental research models for homeopathically prepared dilutions beyond 10-23: a bibliometric study. Homeopathy, 2010; 99: 25-36.
(17) Luc Montagnier, Jamal Aissa, Stéphane Ferris, Jean-Luc Montagnier, Claude Lavallee, Electromagnetic Signals Are Produced by Aqueous Nanostructures Derived from Bacterial DNA Sequences. Interdiscip Sci Comput Life Sci (2009) 1: 81-90.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/0557v31188m3766x/fulltext.pdf
(18) Nobel laureate gives homeopathy a boost. The Australian. July 5, 2010. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/nobel-laureate-gives-homeopathy-a-boost/story-e6frg8y6-1225887772305
(19) Davenas E, Beauvais F, Amara J, et al. (June 1988). "Human basophil degranulation triggered by very dilute antiserum against IgE". Nature 333 (6176): 816-8.
(20) Maddox J (June 1988). "Can a Greek tragedy be avoided?". Nature 333 (6176): 795-7.
(21) Josephson, B. D., Letter, New Scientist, November 1, 1997.
(22) George A. Lone Voices special: Take nobody's word for it. New Scientist. December 9, 2006.
(23) Personal communication. Brian Josephson to Dana Ullman. January 5, 2011.
(24) Chikramane PS, Suresh AK, Bellare JR, and Govind S. Extreme homeopathic dilutions retain starting materials: A nanoparticulate perspective. Homeopathy. Volume 99, Issue 4, October 2010, 231-242.
(25) Human and Experimental Toxicology, July 2010: http://het.sagepub.com/content/vol29/issue7/
To access free copies of these articles, see: http://www.siomi.it/siomifile/siomi_pdf/BELLE_newsletter.pdf

Daily Pill Greatly Lowers AIDS Risk, Study Finds

2010-11-24T01:06:00.000-06:00

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. Published: November 23, 2010

Healthy gay men who took an anti-AIDS pill every day were well protected against contracting H.I.V. in a study suggesting that a new weapon against the epidemic has emerged.

In the study, published Tuesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers found that the men taking Truvada, a common combination of two antiretroviral drugs, were 44 percent less likely to get infected with the virus that causes AIDS than an equal number taking a placebo.

Truvada, by Gilead Sciences, costs around $13,000 a year in the US

But when only the men whose blood tests showed that they had taken their pill faithfully every day were considered, the pill was more than 90 percent effective, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, head of the infectious diseases division of the National Institutes of Health, which paid for the study along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“That’s huge,” Dr. Fauci said. “That says it all for me.”

The large study, nicknamed iPrEx, included nearly 2,500 men and was coordinated by the Gladstone Institutes of the University of California, San Francisco.

The results are the best news in the AIDS field in years, even better than this summer’s revelation that a vaginal microbicide protected 39 percent of all the women testing it and 54 percent of those who used it faithfully.

Also, Truvada, a combination of tenofovir and emtricitabine that prevents the virus from replicating, is available by prescription in many countries right now, while the microbicide gel is made in only small amounts for clinical trials.

The protection, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, is also the first new form available to men, especially men who cannot use condoms because they sell sex, are in danger of prison rape, are under pressure from partners or lose their inhibitions when drunk or high.

It “does not involve getting permission from the other partner, and that’s important,” said Phill Wilson, president of the Black AIDS Institute, which focuses on the epidemic among blacks.

Michel Sidibé, the head of the United Nations agency that fights AIDS, called it “a breakthrough that will accelerate the prevention revolution.”

AIDS experts and the researchers issued several caveats about the study’s limitations, emphasizing that it looked only at gay men and Truvada. More studies, now under way, are needed to see whether the results can be duplicated, whether other antiretroviral drugs will work and whether they will protect heterosexual men and women, prostitutes and drug users who share needles.

There is no medical reason to think the pill would not work in other groups, since it attacks the virus in the blood, not in the vaginal wall as a microbicide does. Pre-exposure prophylaxis became possible only in recent years as newer, less-toxic antiretroviral drugs were developed.

Some scientists fear that putting more people on the drugs will speed the evolution of drug-resistant strains, though that did not occur in the study.

Because Truvada is available now, some clinicians already prescribe it for prophylaxis, Dr. Fauci said, but whether doing so becomes official policy will depend on discussions by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, medical societies and others, which could take months.

Although the C.D.C. would prefer that doctors wait for further studies, more will probably prescribe the drugs now that this study is out, said Dr. Kevin Fenton, chief of the agency’s AIDS division, so the C.D.C. will soon release suggested guidelines.

The agency will suggest that the drug be prescribed only with close medical supervision and used only with other safe-sex practices.

“The results are encouraging, but it’s not time for gay men to throw away their condoms,” Dr. Fenton said.

AIDS advocacy groups were very excited by the results.

“If you comply with it, this works really well,” said Chris Collins, policy director of amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. “This is too big to walk away from.”

Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC, an organization that lobbies for AIDS prevention, called the study “a great day for the fight against AIDS” and said gay men and others at risk needed to be consulted on the next steps.

In the study, 2,499 men in six countries — Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, South Africa, Thailand and the United States — were randomly assigned to take either Truvada or a placebo and were followed for up to three years. For ethical reasons, they were also given condoms, treatment for venereal diseases and advice on safe sex. There were 64 infections in the placebo group and 36 in the group that took Truvada, a 44 percent risk reduction.

Two in the Truvada group turned out to have been infected before the study began. When the remaining 34 were tested, only 3 had any drug in their blood — suggesting that the other 31 had not taken their pills.

Different regimens, like taking the pills not daily but only when sex is anticipated, also need testing.
Also, many men in the study failed to take all of their pills, and some clearly lied about it. For example, some who claimed to take them 50 percent or 90 percent of the time had little or no drug in their bloodstreams.

The pills caused no major side effects, though men who began to show signs of liver problems were taken off them quickly. Some men stopped taking the pills because they disliked relatively minor side effects like nausea and headaches. Also, some stopped bothering once they suspected that they might be taking a placebo.

“People have their own reasons,” Mr. Collins said. “People don’t take their Lipitor every day either.”
A major question now is who will pay for the drug.

In the United States, Truvada, made by Gilead Sciences, costs $12,000 to $14,000 a year. In very poor countries, generic versions cost as little as 40 cents a pill.

Globally, only about 5 million of the 33 million people infected with the AIDS virus are on antiretroviral drugs, and in an era of tight foreign-aid budgets, that number is not expected to rise quickly.

Hundreds of millions of Africans, Eastern Europeans and Asians are at risk and could benefit from prophylaxis, but that would cost tens of billions of dollars.

In this country, insurers and Medicare normally pay for the drugs, and the Ryan White Act covers the cost for the poor, but none of these payers yet have policies on supplying the drugs to healthy people.
No participant in the study developed resistance to tenofovir. Three were found to have strains resistant to emtricitabine, but investigators believe that all three were infected before the study began at levels low enough to have been missed by their first H.I.V. tests.

Another concern was that the participants would become so fearless that they would stop using condoms, but the opposite effect was seen — they used condoms more often and had fewer sex partners. But that can also be a result of simply being enrolled in a study and getting a steady diet of advice on safe sex and free condoms, the investigators said.

Other trials of pre-exposure prophylaxis have about 20,000 volunteers enrolled around the world. Their results are expected over the next two years.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 24, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.

Pastor: "Jesus Was HIV-Positive"

2010-11-02T18:18:00.000-05:00

A pastor in South Africa has shocked churchgoers with a series of sermons claiming Jesus was HIV-positive.

"Today I will start with a three-part sermon on: Jesus was HIV-positive," Xola Skosana said in a recent Sunday service in Cape Town, in a move intended to fight the stigma surrounding the virus.

Read more on Skosana's service on HIVPlusMag.com.

While some are outraged at South African Pastor's Xola Skosana's words because they portray Jesus Christ as possibly being sexually promiscuous, the pastor told followers that Jesus frequently put himself in the position of the poor or sick population.

Skosana also said he used the example to illustrate the stigma that HIV/AIDS still has on South Africans and people around the world.

"Of course, there's no scientific evidence that Jesus had the HI virus in his bloodstream," the pastor said according to the BBC. "The best gift we can give to people who are HIV-positive is to help de-stigmatise Aids and create an environment where they know God is not against them, he's not ashamed of them."

Watch House of Numbers to learn more about HIV and AIDS.

Source: http://advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/11/01/Sermon_Jesus_Was_HIV_Positive/
Source: http://hivplusmag.com/NewsStory.asp?id=22044&sd=11/01/2010

One in 22 Blacks will get HIV, CDC Report Says

2010-11-01T13:37:00.000-05:00

Written by Special to the NNPA from the Milwaukee Community Journal
Sunday, 31 October 2010 09:39
For years it was seen as the “gay, White man’s disease.” But the face for HIV/AIDS has long since changed, bearing a much darker complexion. According to published reports, health officials estimate that one in 22 African Americans will be diagnosed with the AIDS virus in their lifetime — more than twice the risk for Hispanics and eight times that of Whites. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the numbers last week; noting the lifetime risk is one in 52 for Hispanics, and one in 170 for Whites. According to the report, Asian Americans had the lowest lifetime risk, at about one in 222. The data is no longer considered shocking. Earlier research has shown that Black Americans have an exceptionally high risk of HIV infection. Given the disproportionately high rate of risk for the disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently expanded its Act Against AIDS Leadership Initiative to increase prevention efforts in the African-American, Latino, gay and bisexual communities, which are hardest hit by HIV/AIDS. The initiative is a partnership of major community organizations and was launched last year to intensify HIV prevention in the Black community. As part of the new effort, the CDC has reportedly increased funding for the initiative from $10 million to $16 million over six years, brought in eight additional organizational partners, two of which focus specifically on gay Black men, and continues to build on outreach efforts already in place in the Black community. Partners include 100 Black Men of America, American Urban Radio Networks, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, the National Action Network, the NAACP, the National Council of Negro Women, the National Council of Negro Women, the National Medical Association and the National Urban League. Source: http://www.washingtoninformer.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4840:one-in-22-blacks-will-get-hiv-cdc-report-says&catid=44:health&Itemid=138

Sex Survey at D.C. School Sparks Controversy

2010-10-16T11:25:00.000-05:00

Published October 15, 2010 | FoxNews.com

A Washington, D.C., middle school is under fire after distributing a survey to seventh-graders asking both boys and girls about their sexual orientations and whether they knew how to put on a condom, among other sex-based questions.
The survey, developed by Metro TeenAIDS, a group dedicated to helping young people fight against HIV/AIDS, was intended to raise awareness of sexually transmitted diseases and teach the children how to avoid them, MyFoxDC.com reported.

But some parents at Hardy Middle School complained that the questions crossed the line, sparking the principal to put the survey on hold, the Georgetown Dish reported.

The students were asked their genders -- whether male, female or transgender. And they were asked to identify themselves as straight, bisexual, gay or lesbian or "not sure."

Other questions included: How sure are you that you know the difference between oral, vaginal, and anal sex? Would know where to get condoms if/when you or a friend needed them? Can correctly put a condom on yourself or your partner?

The survey also asked about the student's history of sexual activity and what types of sex.

"Unfortunately, the opt-out letter to parents regarding this unit in the health class went home on the same day that the assessment was administered. As a result, there was not enough time to allow for parental response before the unit began," school officials said in a written statement.

“Raising awareness among students about HIV and AIDS is certainly an important and necessary task schools must carry out, and families have an important role to play in the planning and execution of the sex education curriculum," D.C. Mayor-elect Vincent Gray said in an e-mail to The Georgetown Dish. "I hope that the Hardy school leadership, parents, and contract providers can talk about these recent developments to ensure that no one is surprised in the future.”
Metro TeenAIDS says the survey questions are in line with D.C. standards, which outline the kind of information young people are supposed to get at certain ages, as well as national testing questions on the subject.

To parents who are concerned the survey revealed too much information for a 12-year-old, Metro TeenAIDS' executive director, Adam Tenner, told MyFoxDC.com that most of those 12-year-olds are much more experienced sexually than those parents might think.

“Our local data show that almost 23 percent of middle school students -- and this was in a 2009 survey -- said that they had already had sexual intercourse once,” he said. “We know that we have an STD epidemic that’s 16 times the national average, that our pregnancy rates are three times the national average … so what we know is that young people are sexually active and we need to work together parents, schools, all of us to make sure young people get the information and skills they need to protect themselves.”

Watch House of Numbers to learn more about HIV and AIDS.

Inappropriate water kills more than war, Hiv/Aids

2010-09-22T00:42:00.000-05:00

Luanda – The director-general of Eduardo dos Santos Foundation (FESA), João de Deus, said Tuesday, in Luanda, that the number of children that dies of intake of inappropriate water in the world is larger than those killed by war’s Hiv-Aids, malaria and road accident.

João de Deus was addressing in his capacity as host for the 14th FESA events.

He on the occasion cited Maude Barlow, in his book “water-blue covenant” that states that as the ecological crisis deepens, so does human crisis.

Water global crisis, he added, became a powerful symbol of the world’s growing inequality. While the rich drink high quality water, whenever they please, millions of poor people only drink contaminated water, which becomes a true evil of humanity.

To him, in addition to the urgent reflections in the scientific field, there is need for this problem to be addressed, which requires a political public health and ethic approach.

The event comprises four panels and during the four days the participants will tackle such topics as “Water and food for end of poverty”, “Water, sanitation and health for all”.

“Monitoring of indicators associated with the millennium goals”, “Water and climatic changes and natural disasters”, “Water, environmental impact and situation of scarcity” and “The future of water policy and global crisis of environment”, are some of the topics for the event.

Other topics are “Interactive tri-party dialogue between Government, civil society and science, aiming at mitigating and managing disasters”, “Cooperation for adequate management of trans-frontier hydraulic basins” and Preservation of natural ecosystems in the integrated management of water resources”.

“The role of underground waters with strategic water reserves”, “The importance of steering plans on water and sanitation in the success of the implementation of respective projects” and “Water for energy, energy for water” as well as “The financial model for construction of hydrometric monitoring infrastructures, supply of water and sanitation”, are other topics for the meeting.

According to the note, the event will receive addresses from Angolan, Portuguese, Brazilian, Italian, British, American, German, Canadian and Spanish lecturers and will include the topics “Public-private partnership in water management: experiences and opportunities”, “Institutional reform and regularisation as fundamental factor of water and sanitation services”, “Water, juridical reflexes of national and international institutional scope” and the “Role of tariffs in water services”.

To learn more about HIV/AIDS and poverty watch House of Numbers.

Click here to see Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize Winner for discovering HIV discuss clean water being key for the body and that HIV may be able to be cleared naturally.

www.houseofnumbers.com

Story source: http://www.portalangop.co.ao/motix/en_us/noticias/sociedade/2010/8/38/Inappropriate-water-kills-more-than-war-Hiv-Aids,e0f9dd10-f390-418e-87af-91a6841231d7.html

HIV tests a farce? False HIV positives produced by western blot tests

2010-09-08T15:21:00.000-05:00

HIV tests a farce? False HIV positives produced by western blot tests

(NaturalNews) Did you or someone you know test positive for HIV? If so, they probably weren't told that they might test negative if a different test were used... or even if the same test were conducted in another country. HIV tests, as you'll see here, are a wishy-washy, pseudoscientific gimmickry that has unfortunately ensnared many innocent victims into a false AIDS diagnosis.

This is now being revealed in some rather shocking video footage released by Brent Leung, creator of the House of Numbers documentary (www.HouseOfNumbers.com) which tears apart the inconsistencies and dogmatic non-science found in the conventional HIV / AIDS industry.

Watch the footage yourself right now at: http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=E9FEA...

There, you'll see world-renowned scientists discussing the so-called "western blot," a highly subjective test that is now being used around the world to falsely diagnose people with HIV and, subsequently, AIDS. This western blot, as you'll learn below, is a spectacularly laughable test that seems to have been designed to make "positive" criteria as loose as possible in order to label perfectly healthy people as having AIDS.

"I don't think the western blot is a useful diagnostic test. I don't think it's worth doing," argues Dr Robin Weiss in the video clip.

Val Turner, an MD from Australia, adds, "It's ludicrous that you can be [HIV] positive in one country and not positive in another."

Neville Hodgkinson, the Medical and Science Correspondent for The Sunday Times (London) adds, "Some people argue that we have a confirmatory test in some western countries, and that repeated testing can lead you to a safer diagnosis. But if the very basis of the test is faulty, then nothing works in fact. ...Because of the different criteria that apply in different countries, you can test HIV positive in one country and be given an AIDS diagnosis as a result of that, whereas in another country you won't test HIV positive and you won't be given an AIDS diagnosis."

A full-blown AIDS patient will almost always show nine different "bands" on an HIV test. But in the 1980's, only one band was required -- P24 -- to diagnose someone as HIV positive (and subsequently having AIDS). The problem is that perfectly healthy people can also test positive for P24, even if they aren't HIV positive.

"In the early days, people developed criteria that were too much like a screening test. So if you had just P24 [band], they might have called it a positive," said Robert Redfield MD, Director, Clinical Care and Research, Institute of Human Virology.

Doctor Val Turner adds, "Many people were diagnosed using these criteria, and then it was realized that forty percent of people who are completely healthy have one or more western blot bands, most commonly a P24 band."

A few years later, the FDA changed its diagnosis criteria for HIV, upping the requirement beyond a single P24 band. But people who had already been diagnosed as having AIDS were never re-tested!

Dr Val Turner explains, "We don't know how many thousand people were testing using that western blot criteria before 1987, but ... shouldn't they all have been tested when the criteria changed in 1987 in case they were no longer positive? So there are probably people out there who would not be positive under the criteria which developed subsequently. Using the FDA criteria which existed before 1993, only 80 percent of AIDS patients had a positive HIV test, which means 20 percent were not positive."

HIV tests depend on personal opinion, not rigorous science

Even today, HIV tests are conducted in a wishy-washy, non-scientific manner where the results depend largely on the opinion of the lab technician reading the test results! (It's absurd, of course, but this is what's happening right now.)

In House of Numbers, Brent Leung visited Claudia Kücherer, MD, a Molecular Biologist at the Robert Kock Institute in Berlin. There, he recorded this conversation:

Brent: "When you're looking at this western blot, how do you determine what is a positive [result]?"

Claudia: "You need a certain number of bands being present. It depends a little bit on the producer of the test."

Brent: "It depends on the manufacturer?"

Claudia: "Yes"

Brent: "Is there a different criteria for what might be a positive?"

Claudia: "Yeah, there are different criteria from the manufacturer."

Manufacturers of the HIV test, in other words, differ in how they define a "positive." You might be "HIV positive" on one test, but negative on another. And the decision on which manufacturer's test to use is based on the opinion of the clinic, hospital or doctor ordering the tests.

Astonishingly, this House of Numbers footage also includes a scene featuring two different HIV test lab technicians working in the same lab who disagree on the criteria for a positive HIV test result. While one lab workers says two bands are needed for a positive diagnosis, another worker says three are required. And they work in the same lab!

Watch this footage yourself right here: http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=E9FEA...

Western blot HIV test called into question

But some scientists feel the western blot is not just a good test, but a great one! Robert C Gallo MD, Director of the Institute of Human Virology, says "This has a margin of error if done properly that's extremely low. In other words, it's one of medicine's better tests."

One of medicine's better tests? Really? And yet it can be interpreted in different ways by different lab technicians, different definitions in different countries, different manufacturers and different medical opinions?

The HIV tests, it turns out, is more a matter of opinion than scientific fact. And if you or someone you know has tested positive for HIV, maybe they should get a second opinion.

Why not make the test more accurate?

So why doesn't the industry tighten up its guidelines and require five, six or even all nine bands to show up before diagnosing someone as HIV positive? No one seems to know.

I do, though. Isn't it obvious? The AIDS industry is much like the cancer industry in that it's focused on diagnosing as many patients as possible whether or not they actually have the disease. More patients equals more profits and a bigger "scare story" to feed the media propaganda machines.

We already know that the AIDS industry fabricated evidence to try to exaggerate the scope of the AIDS scare (http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=D35F0...). So it's not surprising they would be promoting a "loose" test that potentially has already ensnared potentially tens of thousands of innocent people into a false AIDS diagnosis.

Once a person is diagnosed with AIDS, you see, they become a profit generating machine for Big Pharma. AIDS pharmaceuticals are extremely expensive, and because they are protected under an FDA-enforced monopoly, they can be sold at practically any asking price.

Even better, once innocent "healthy" people start taking AIDS drugs, they begin to show AIDS symptoms such as compromised immune systems. These side effects are caused by the drugs, of course, not by the disease, but in the minds of doctors and patients, the emergence of these scary symptoms proves that "they really had AIDS."

It's all just loopy, circular logic with a single purpose: To earn more money for Big Pharma at the expense of human suffering.

Now, I'm not saying there's no such thing as a genuine person with immune deficiency. Thanks mostly to our toxic environment, there are certainly people who suffer chronic immune system malfunctions. But it is in the AIDS industry's interests to convince even healthy people that they are ill and need pharmaceutical intervention to survive. And, by sheer coincidence (not!), today's HIV tests are specifically designed in a way that produces a disturbingly high number of false positives.

See the complete collection of exclusive clips from House of Numbers at NaturalNews.TV: http://naturalnews.tv/Browse.asp?me...

AIDS Quest to Kill `Sleeping' Virus Enlists Merck Cancer Drug

2010-09-02T16:21:00.001-05:00

The 30-year-long search for a cure for AIDS, the world’s deadliest viral infection, may get a renewed boost from an unlikely source: a little-used Merck & Co. cancer drug.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill plan to test Merck’s drug, Zolinza, next year in about 20 people infected with HIV, the AIDS virus. The goal is to determine if Zolinza, or a medicine like it, can force HIV out of cells where it can reside, concealed from attack by potent antiviral treatments, said David Margolis, a professor of medicine who’s leading the research.

While AIDS drug cocktails can eliminate more than 99 percent of virus from an infected person, the treatment isn’t a cure because a remnant of the virus remains hidden in certain cells. For years, scientists have sought a simple way to drive the remaining virus into the bloodstream where the drugs can clear them from the body. Zolinza, approved in 2006 for use against a rare type of blood cancer, may work by blocking an enzyme that helps the virus avoid detection.

“It’s really all about trying to move the field ahead,” Margolis said in a telephone interview. “We don’t expect to cure anybody, but we expect to really show whether it can work the way we think it does in people -- or not.”

Zolinza earned Whitehouse Station, New Jersey-based Merck $15 million in 2008, the last year it disclosed sales of the drug, for treating a malignancy of white blood cells that affects the skin. In a laboratory test published last year, Margolis used the medicine to coax HIV out of hiding in cells taken from infected patients. Now he wants to replicate the result inside the body. Success would show he’s on the right track to finding a cure.

Mysterious Illness

“There is a good chance that it will cause some activation of latently infected cells,” said Robert Siliciano, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who first identified the cells in which HIV hides out, and isn’t involved in the Zolinza trial. “Nobody knows if it will work, but it’s important to try.”

AIDS was first observed as a mysterious illness among gay men in the U.S. in 1981, the same year Margolis started medical school at Harvard University in Boston. Since then it’s killed more than 25 million people, mostly in Africa.

Medicines developed over the past 20 years by companies including GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. control HIV without purging it from the body. Combination regimens can drive virus levels down so low that patients can live healthy lives. But since a small amount of the virus can remain hidden, the infection can re-emerge and endanger patients if treatments are ended.
“We’re never going to cure anybody unless we go for this latent pool,” Siliciano said. In May he received $360,000 from the New York-based Foundation for AIDS Research to identify drugs approved for other diseases that may work against latent HIV, just as Margolis is doing.

Increasing Investments

The costs of treating HIV rise every year as more people become infected, and because people need to stay on medication to keep HIV at bay. President Barack Obama in February requested $14.1 billion for the treatment and care of AIDS patients in the U.S. next year, 6.8 percent more than the $13.2 billion in the 2010 federal budget, according to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a Menlo Park, California-based nonprofit health research group.

Governments, companies and foundations are increasing their investments in cure research, spurred by treatment costs, advances in science and the failure of researchers to develop a vaccine. The U.S. National Institutes of Health last month offered $8.5 million a year for five years for research projects aimed at finding a cure. The Foundation for AIDS Research in May gave $1 million to four research groups in Sweden and the U.S. for the same purpose.

‘Hopeless Problem’

“It’s gone from being a hopeless problem to one that people think we should devote a big effort to,” Siliciano said. “I used to be very pessimistic about the likelihood of finding a cure. I guess I’m less so.”

Gilead Sciences Inc., the world’s biggest maker of AIDS medicines, started work on finding a cure in 2009 and wants to test an experimental drug in monkeys next year. Johnson & Johnson’s Tibotec unit, which also started looking for a cure last year, is screening thousands of compounds and plans to design experiments in rodents and monkeys that would allow it to test the most promising candidates.
“We should not and cannot continue to accept that HIV is a long-term chronic illness that commits patients to lifelong treatment with associated toxicities,” said Sharon Lewin, head of infectious diseases at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne. “In the absence of an effective vaccine, we must seriously pursue the possibility of cure,” Lewin said in a speech at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna last month.

Scientists are exploring two main ways of clearing viral reservoirs. The first involves reducing them to such low levels they can be corralled by the immune system, allowing patients to go off medications without the virus rebounding. The second strategy involves making patients resistant to HIV infection by giving them a genetic mutation that makes it impossible for the virus to enter cells.

Lasting Damage

The Zolinza trial is part of the first effort. Margolis said his work was inspired by the failure of a Dutch study a decade ago. The scientists tried to flush out HIV using antibodies, proteins made naturally by the body to fight infection, to activate all the cells that typically host latent virus. The treatment over-stimulated the subjects’ immune systems, causing lasting damage to some patients.
“Pretty much since that time I’ve been looking at selectively purging the virus without activating the cell,” Margolis said.

He published a paper in the journal Lancet in 2005 showing that Depakote, an approved treatment for bipolar disorder made by Abbott Laboratories, reduced the number of infected resting cells by as much as 84 percent when combined with Roche Holding AG’s AIDS drug Fuzeon, in a study involving four patients. Subsequent research by Margolis and others contradicted those findings.

“David deserves a lot of credit for moving the field with those initial studies,” Daria Hazuda, Merck’s worldwide antiviral franchise head, said in a telephone interview.

Viral Kickstart

Now Margolis is trying again with Zolinza. Like Depakote, Zolinza targets an enzyme called histone deacetylase, or HDAC, that helps HIV go to sleep in cells by interfering with its ability to replicate. By blocking HDAC, Zolinza would reactivate the virus, kickstarting reproduction.

From there, nature would take its course: HIV would exit and kill its host cell, and enter the bloodstream in search of new cells to infect. Anti-AIDS drugs would prevent it from doing so, and with nowhere left to go, the virus would die after several hours.

Margolis and his colleagues plan to give about 20 patients a few doses of Zolinza, then measure whether it’s had any effect on the amount of virus the immune cells are producing. That will tell them whether they’ve succeeded in disturbing the reservoir.

Zolinza, also known as SAHA, may not be suitable as a cure for AIDS because of its potential to cause genetic mutations that lead to cancer, Margolis said. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration accepts that risk when the drug is being used in patients who already have cancer. It probably won’t tolerate the risk for use in other diseases, Margolis said.

‘Getting a Tan’

The FDA has approved the trial “because we will so severely limit the exposure to SAHA that the risk of inducing cancer is felt to be negligible, like getting on a plane and taking a flight to New York, or lying on the beach and getting a tan,” he said.

Margolis plans to apply to the NIH for funding “in the next few weeks.” If the trial succeeds or fails early, it may cost less than $500,000. A longer trial may cost as much as $1.5 million over three years, he said.

Merck supports the study, and is continuing its own research on other drugs that it might be able to combine with HDAC inhibitors, Hazuda said.

“Everybody has now come to the conclusion that it’s going to take a combination of different approaches,” Hazuda said. “Because there are HDAC inhibitors that are already licensed to treat other diseases, they may provide at least an anchor upon which to build a first-generation regimen.

Collateral Damage

Gilead is also experimenting with about a dozen families of its own HDAC inhibitors, said Romas Geleziunas, the company’s director of biology. The aim is to select one to test in monkeys as early as next year. The challenge is identifying a drug that’s powerful enough to activate HIV and not so powerful it causes collateral damage, he said in a telephone interview.

Geleziunas said he has “no idea” what the research project might mean for Gilead commercially.
“We’re all just trying to get our heads around the science, and trying to prove that in animal models these things have even a slight hope of working,” he said. “I really have no idea where this is going to go.”

Tibotec isn’t limiting itself to HDAC inhibitors, said Bruce Malcolm, the Beerse, Belgium-based company’s senior director of HIV research and early development.

“We’re casting a wide net,” Malcolm said in a telephone interview. “We’ll go about looking for anything and everything that proves useful, especially since we feel in the end it will probably be some combination of compounds that will be put together that will lead to the best efficacy and minimal toxicity.”

Berlin Patient

The second strategy has scientists looking for clues from the only person known to have been cured of HIV. The man, who researchers call “the Berlin patient,” was a leukemia sufferer who received a bone marrow transplant from a donor resistant to HIV in 2006. The donor’s cells lacked a protein on the surface called CCR5 that the virus needs to latch on. Without it, the virus can’t get a grip on the cell and infection is averted.

Sangamo Biosciences Inc., a biotechnology company based in Richmond, California, started two trials last year aimed at achieving the same result in a simpler way. Its approach uses a cold-causing virus as a Trojan horse to smuggle a CCR5-deleting gene into the body. The company said in November that one trial subject who had stopped taking AIDS drugs had undetectable levels of HIV one month later, though the virus was detectable after six weeks.

‘Before I Die’

Some scientists are skeptical a cure will be ever achieved, given HIV’s ability to integrate itself into the DNA of cells.

“We’ve never eradicated an integrated virus,” said David Cooper, director of Australia’s National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research. “That doesn’t mean we can’t do it, but it would be the first. At the end of the day, a vaccine is the best approach.”

Margolis is more optimistic.

“I’m 51,” says Margolis. “I’m not doing this because I think that I can’t succeed before I die.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Simeon Bennett in Singapore at sbennett9@bloomberg.net

Watch House of Numbers to learn more about AIDS drugs.

German singer guilty of infecting partner with AIDS virus

2010-08-30T22:21:00.000-05:00

Nadja Benaissa, former singer for the German band No Angels, waits for the verdict in a courtroom in Darmstad.

By Boris Roessler, AP

German pop star Nadja Benaissa has been convicted of knowingly infecting a sex partner with HIV. The 28-year-old former singer for the female band No Angels was given a two-year suspended sentence and ordered to perform community service with HIV-positive people, according to German news reports.Benaissa admitted having the AIDS virus but did not tell three partners with whom she had sex without condoms between 2000 and 2004. She was 17 the first time.

She wept when the verdict was read in court in Darmstadt, near Frankfurt, Der Spiegel writes.

"It will always be painful for me," she said yesterday in her final statement, noting how her former lover was suffering. "I wish I could turn back time and make it not have happened."

She denied intentionally trying to infect anyone, saying she believed there was little chance of passing the virus. She was concerned that publicizing her infection might harm her daughter and the band, CNN reports, citing the Bild newspaper.
(Posted by Michael Winter)

See more on HIV heterosexual transmission here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfnYciuXeB4

Watch House of Numbers to learn more on the subject.

Source: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2010/08/german-singer-guilty-of-infecting-partner-with-aids-virus/1

House of Numbers Documentary – Directed By Brent Leung

2010-08-13T00:52:00.002-05:00

House of Numbers, by newcomer filmmaker, Brent Leung, is a shocking documentary that packs a very powerful punch. So much so that what you have witnessed stays with you long after you have switched the tv off.
This is a film thats going to make you think……alot. And so it should. It’s about a very very serious subject.

I don’t think I know of a single other subject that creates so much debate amongst people. And sometimes, I witness certain people, who really have no clue as to what they are talking about, show utter hatred to other fellow humans simply because they don’t agree, and have not questioned what they know.

And the debates I have witnessed are ugly, really ugly. Sometimes, in extreme cases there are even death threats involved, it gets that bad. I have received a few threats myself, whenever I write about something similar to this, that goes against the mainstream medical beliefs.

I can also guarantee that within a short amount of time goes by after posting this review, someone will leave a very one-sided comment about this film and attack me also for having the ‘audacity’ to review it. There are people who are paid to simply sit and do Google Searches to see if there are any new posts on topics such as this. So threatening are movies like this…….

House of Numbers is on a subject that most of us think we know alot about or it’s something we push aside because we simply don’t want to know. Some were perhaps along time ago, scared into thinking a certain way, and have had that ingrained into our minds so much so, that its impossible for some, to think of another, new way.

”To think, ”What if they, are wrong?, ”What if, what I have thought is wrong too?” ”And if we are wrong, what does that mean?”

House Of Numbers is a groundbreaking documentary about, AIDS.

Have you ever asked yourself, ”What is HIV? What is AIDS? And what is being done to cure it?’?
Do you know the answers? Do you really know enough of the facts?

You might think you do, but I am telling you, you more than likely don’t know enough to paint the full picture. Ask yourself, what do you know and who told you this information and when? Has anything changed since you were told about AIDS? Was it like for me, from the Television through scary Grim Reaper Ads?

"This is the beginning of a war... to reclaim our health"

First time film maker, Brent Leung, asked himself these questions from a young age and didn’t really ever find out enough answers that made sense.
A few years ago, he set out on a world wide journey with a quest to find out these very answers he just had to know.
He set up interviews with prominent Doctors, Scientists, Researchers and Journalists, all who are experts in their fields. He visits London, the USA, the slums of South Africa where disease and death are so common it has become normal and other countries also, to try and understand, do we all believe the same thing around the world?

He questions why, after 29 years, with so much press, billions of pounds spent, and massive worldwide media attention, there is still no cure in sight and not much real understanding of AIDS, leaving plenty of misguided people unsure, of what it all even means.

What Brent uncovers in this documentary will leave you with your mouth gaping wide open.
He reveals a massive research establishment in total disarray with a health policy gone right off course.
Brent interviews and easily manages to get completely candid interviews with the most powerful, well known and influential people in the ‘AIDS’ Industry.

Some of these interviews and what is uncovered will be why your mouth is left dragging on the floor. You can see snippets of them below.
Brent interviews the two Scientists awarded the ‘prize’ for discovering the HIV virus. He also talks in depth with highly acclaimed Nobel Laureates, Presidential Advisors, survivors, activists and the Executive Director of UNAIDS.

The answers they give to the questions that are asked, will at times, make you sit up in shock.
I have been researching AIDS for the last year and by far, this is the most eye opening film I have seen.

Brent’s relaxed interview style and non aggressive approach seems to bring out shocking revelations and equally as stunning hypocritical contradictions.

This is a movie that is simply brilliant and one that is also extremely threatening because it is blowing the lid off a subject with completely misguided ‘facts’ and fallacies that have been kept in the dark from us for far too long.

House of Numbers has the power to completely change the way we see AIDS. What is presented in this film is totally undeniable and presented in a way that is surprisingly unbiased and lets the viewer decide for themselves: what is really going on?

Let it be known though, that the documentary never denies the existence of AIDS or HIV.
”The HIV/AIDS story is being rewritten, and this is the first film to present the uncensored POVs of virtually all the major players — in their own settings, in their own words. It rocks the foundation upon which all conventional wisdom regarding HIV/AIDS is based. If, as South African health advocate Pephsile Maseko remarks, “this is the beginning of a war…a war to reclaim our health,” then House of Numbers could well be the opening salvo in the battle to bring sanity and clarity to an epidemic clearly gone awry.’

House of Numbers is a must see film, watch these snippets below to find out why……..
I will leave you with my thoughts and a whole bunch of stuff to investigate:
Every day, in the media, we as people, are reading more and more reports that we are being lied to. The Governments lie to us, the Media controls what they let us know and Big Corporations control both.

The recent BP oil spill should make even the most skeptical of people start to agree with this after seeing the lack of care, concern and CONTROL and Media block out for the clean up. We are all seeing that Big Money equals Big Power. I will say it again, Big Money equals Big Power.
Pharmaceutical companies are being involved in huge scandals, paying people to lie and get them on their side. Drugs being released deemed as ’safe’ to use, only to cause many deaths and serious problems. Then we read about the Drug Company ‘conflict of interest’ funded Medical Journals our Doctors are reading and believing. And information being released to the public is either hidden or exaggerated.

With more than 200 Billion dollars spent on AIDS funding, with more being requested, does that mean Big Money to you?

So now I ask you to think, could what we possibly think we know, be possibly, completely wrong?
WATCH FULL LENGTH ON AMAZON - VIDEO ON DEMAND IN THE USA

To purchase DVD Visit House of Numbers.com

Below: House Of Numbers Trailer

More Clips can be seen here:

by Anna Rodgers on August 7th, 2010

Source: http://blog.missecoglam.com/2010/08/house-of-numbers-documentary-directed-by-brent-leung.html

Chris Nielsen, Shares his Opinion after Watching HoN

2010-08-11T22:54:00.001-05:00

Submitted to HouseofNumbers.com
Date: August 9, 2010 11:07:56 PM CDT

"I was thoroughly furious after watching this infantile movie. I came out in 1983 when this movie maker was still in diapers. Ironically gay men at this time would soon be in diapers literally sick to death with AIDS. Let's get something straight, AIDS is the most appropriate term for this disorder. It simply describes an acquired syndrome, which is what a person has the second that he or she is infected with the HIV virus. But all of this posturing over whether someone has HIV or AIDS is nothing more than people trying to deny or candy coat the fact a person has an acquired syndrome which is impacting their immune system, i.e. AIDS. Just because a person is not showing symptoms or has a T-cell count of a certain number does not remove the fact that HIV is doing some sort of damage, i.e. a syndrome is in progress. Frankly I think that making a lethal disorder such as AIDS sound prettier or less deadly is criminal. I think a lot of pressure is coming from the gay community, where a huge number of gay men are HIV positive and sexually active. This is why they want the disorder to sound less deadly: so they have a better chance of getting laid. I think this current mindset amongst gay men and supposed health care professionals, who are now lumping "HIV Disease?" with measles or herpes, is downright socio-pathic. I am gay and 49, and am totally proud of the fact that I care enough about myself and humanity to remain HIV negative. It frankly sickens me that so many people, particularly gay men, are so god damned cavalier about this disorder. Back in the 80s and 90s, when so many great people were praying for some way to stay alive, we would have given anything to have the current drug cocktails. And isn't it sickening that so many people are now running around barebacking with no care in the world simply because they can get these drugs. It is a huge slap in the face to all of the gay men who died in the 80s and 90s. I am ashamed to be gay when I think about how badly gay men are acting at this time!"

Good or bad, we want to hear your thoughts.

Thank you for your honest critique Chris.

Visit www.houseofnumbers.com for more information

The state budget and AIDS policy

2010-07-30T11:58:00.000-05:00

By Frank Stoppenbach
Red Hook

Published: Friday, July 30, 2010 2:14 AM EDT

Though unable to craft a balanced state budget, New York’s fractious legislature voted unanimously to no longer require written consent for HIV tests.

I would have voted against the bill. First, because of the life-changing (and permanent) implications of a positive HIV test. Second, and more important, because there are many unresolved questions about HIV tests that really call for a reexamination of them.

I can actually prove the need for a reexamination. How can someone who is neither a doctor nor a scientist do so?

The same way business people and legislators who are not technical experts do – by asking reasonable questions (often formulated for them by technical experts). If reasonable answers do not come back, something is wrong.

For HIV and AIDS, 38 questions raised by doctors and scientists were put into a presentation and sent, along with a cover letter summarizing ten of the questions, to the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).

HHS did respond to seven of the questions, and you can see the correspondence back and forth at www.aidspetition.org/Questions. I think it is evident that HHS was not able to resolve the ten questions, with one exception.

Three of the questions were (1) Why do criteria for a positive HIV test, unlike any other test, differ by geography; (2) Dr. Henry Bauer’s finding that positive HIV tests in the U. S. correlated with race, even in low risk populations, suggesting that the tests indicate general immune system activity, not the presence of a microbe; (3) The fact that most babies who test HIV-positive at 9 months (after maternal antibodies have disappeared) turn negative by 24 months, seemingly curing themselves of incurable HIV.

A few months ago, HIV co-discoverer Dr. Montagnier, seeking to explain the high rates of HIV in Africa, and low rates here, in effect said that a healthy immune system can get rid of HIV[1].

Which raised the question: why are we spending huge sums (nearly 3 percent of New York state’s entire budget, an incredible $3.2 billion), mostly on very costly anti-HIV drugs, if basic nutrition and health measures can solve the problem?

It may come as a surprise that the HIV tests, which form the basis for an AIDS or HIV diagnosis, have unresolved concerns. Or that the role of HIV in AIDS is unproven.

The latter point was made by Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis, who discovered that there was no scientific reference that could back up the statement, “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS”.

Dr. Robert Gallo, the co-author of the original and widely referenced paper linking HIV with AIDS, acknowledged under oath that it was not sufficient for proof.

In normal science, such questions get resolved by debate and new experiments. But HIV/AIDS has really transcended science, and is now almost beyond questioning.

This situation is due to HIV/AIDS’ dual role: (1) as an explanation for certain illnesses; (2) as a cautionary tale to promote sexual responsibility. Questioning the first undermines the second, so we are caught in what might be termed a policy trap, doomed to continue spending outrageous sums that amount to a wealth transfer from taxpayers to the drug industry.

Slowly, though, the questions are getting asked, as in the documentary “House of Numbers”. And perhaps New York’s budget problems will finally lead to hearings on the questions surrounding AIDS policy and spending.

Questioning AIDS dogma is controversial, but it is not clear why. All other policies undergo review and audit, and the scientists who have raised questions have only asked for a fair hearing.

The worst that could happen, if the concerns are unfounded, is that a small amount of time and money would have been spent gaining more confidence in the current policy.

On the other hand, if the HIV skeptics are proven correct, it is possible that tens of millions will have stigma lifted, and the chance to be cured, likely saving many billions of dollars annually.

Thoughtful comments are welcome (siteinfo@aidspetition.org). For critics, do try to include an explanation for the self-curing babies.

Original Source: http://www.thedailymail.net/articles/2010/07/30/opinion/doc4c5267ebb5df2488101532.txt

HIV vaccines cause 50 percent false positive rate in HIV tests

2010-07-20T10:04:00.000-05:00

(NaturalNews) It may come as a big surprise to most people, but HIV tests given to people today don't actually test for the presence of the HIV virus. Rather, they test for the presence of HIV antibodies that the immune system creates to defend itself against HIV. And just because you have HIV antibodies doesn't mean you actually carry HIV. In some circumstances, up to 50 percent of HIV positives are false, causing havoc with the lives of those patients who are falsely accused of being "HIV positive."

This startling fact was revealed in a recent study that's being published in the July 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. It shows that patients who are recruited for HIV vaccine trials often end up testing positive for HIV even though they were only exposed to the vaccine, not the virus.

"Almost half of HIV-negative people who participate in clinical trials for HIV vaccines end up testing positive on routine HIV tests -- even though they're not actually infected" reports US News & World Report.

Some vaccines caused a false positive rate of over 86 percent.

HIV tests lack credibility

What this new study clearly demonstrates is the complete lack of scientific credibility of common HIV tests. It also demonstrates the dangers of getting vaccinated against HIV, because the mere act of receiving an HIV vaccination may cause you to test positive for HIV which, in turn, can have many serious repercussions in your life:

• You may be denied employment because tests show you are "HIV positive."

• You may be denied health insurance coverage or be charged significantly more than others for the same coverage.

• You may be denied residence in other countries, as many countries require HIV tests for prospective new residency.

• You may be falsely accused of having AIDS by health authorities who archive your medical records and use them against you.

• You may be arrested and sent to prison, accused of attempted murder, by sleeping with someone and not telling them you were HIV positive (even though you don't have AIDS).

• You may be denied the opportunity to participate in certain professions or activities (such as sporting events).

• You may be socially stigmatized and thought of as an "AIDS carrier."

• You may be shunned by sex partners or a spouse.

All this could happen to you if you receive an HIV vaccine -- even if you don't carry the HIV virus!

Why HIV and AIDS vaccines are medically unnecessary

We have already established here on NaturalNews that HIV / AIDS vaccines are medically unnecessary. A healthy immune system can fight off HIV in the same way it fights off a cold virus. But don't just take my word for it; listen to the words of Dr Luc Montagnier, the Nobel prize-winning virologist credited with the co-discovery of HIV. He says:

"We can be exposed to HIV many times without being ... infected. Our immune system creates [antibodies] within a few weeks, if you have a good immune system."
(http://naturalnews.com/027355_AIDS_...)

Your own body, in other words, can protect itself from HIV exposure with the same technology your body uses to save your life from influenza every year: Your immune system.

HIV vaccines, then, are entirely unnecessary. Vaccines are Big Pharma's way of selling you something you don't need by trying to convince you that you might die without it. And when it comes to AIDS, Big Pharma has done a terrific job of scaring people into pursuing all kinds of unnecessary treatments that only harm their health in the long run.

In this way, the AIDS industry is much like the breast cancer industry... or the prostate cancer industry: Most of what they push onto people is medically unjustified, scientifically unproven and actually harms more people than it helps. But it's great for generating more profits for Big Pharma.

And that's the point of all this. AIDS is just another profit center for the drug industry, and if their vaccines actually cause you to test positive for HIV, that's even better for their profits because some percentage of those people who test positive are probably going to be put on retroviral drugs to treat HIV, and those drugs are massive profit centers for Big Pharma.

Western medicine causes disease instead of curing it

See, what's really fascinating here is that the AIDS industry demonstrates yet again how the medical industry causes the very diseases it claims to be treating. Mammograms -- which claim to "detect" breast cancer -- actually cause breast cancer. So if you get enough mammograms, eventually you'll develop breast cancer and require expensive cancer treatments.

The AIDS industry now works in much the same way: If you get an HIV vaccine, chances are you're then going to test positive for being an HIV carrier, and you'll become an "AIDS patient" who spends your life savings on needless drugs and other expensive treatments for a disease you don't even have!

The psychiatric industry works the same way, too: It actually invents fictitious diseases such as "oppositional defiance disorder" (which means disagreeing with authority) and then tries to put children and adults on mind-altering psychotropic drugs to "treat" that disease.

The more you look into the industries of pharmaceuticals and vaccines, the more you realize the whole business is just full of bunk. Their vaccines don't work, their tests produce false positives and their pharmaceuticals can kill you.

That's why it's so much easier to just take care of your own health, build up a healthy immune system, avoid exposure to toxic chemicals and let your body's miraculous immune system do the job for you.

See this jaw-dropping video clip about the AIDS fraud

Do you still think an AIDS diagnosis is reliable? Did you know that a huge percentage of people who are diagnosed with AIDS were never tested for HIV?

Watch this stunning new video clip from House of Numbers to learn the rest of the story: http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=0B547...

See more clips or buy the DVD of this remarkable documentary at www.HouseOfNumbers.com

Sources for this story include:
http://health.usnews.com/health-new...

HIV drug causes liver damage, admits FDA

2010-07-19T22:39:00.000-05:00

Monday, July 19, 2010 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer

(NaturalNews) The HIV drug Videx (sold generically as didanosine) may cause fatal liver problems, the FDA has warned.

Since the drug's initial approval, the agency has received 42 adverse event reports linking Videx and its delayed release version Videx EC to a rare liver disorder known as non-cirrotic portal hypertension. In four of these cases, patients died from liver failure or severe bleeding. Only three patients were able to fully recover from the condition, and all of those needed a liver transplant. Patients had been undergoing treatment with the drug for anywhere from months to years.

Although it has not yet been proven that the drugs caused the liver disorder, the FDA noted that there is definitely an association between the two.

In non-cirrotic portal hypertension, blood flow through a major vein in the liver becomes constricted, causing blood to back up into the esophagus. Veins in the throat can become so enlarged that they rupture, leading to serious and potentially fatal bleeding.

Although the FDA stated that the benefits for HIV patients still outweigh the risks, it warned that Videx patients should be closely monitored for any signs of portal hypertension. Furthermore, it noted that "the decision to use this drug ... must be made on an individual basis between the treating physician and the patient."

Videx was first approved in 1991, and the delayed release version was approved in 2000. The drug is a type of antiretroviral drug known as a nucleoside analogue, and slows the proliferation of HIV to prolong the onset of AIDS and extend the life of patients.

It has previously been linked to other forms of liver damage, especially in combination with other antiretroviral drugs including hydroxyurea and ribavirin.

According to a spokesperson for manufacturer Bristol-Myers Squib, worldwide sales of the drug amounted to $71 million in 2009.

Sources for this story include: www.aboutlawsuits.com/hiv-drug-vide... online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100129-714703.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines; www.medscape.com/viewarticle/716198.

Watch House of Numbers to learn more about HIV, AIDS and AIDS Drugs.

Nobel laureate gives homeopathy a boost

2010-07-14T21:20:00.000-05:00

The Australian July 05, 2010 12:00AM

A NOBEL laureate who discovered the link between HIV and AIDS has suggested there could be a firm scientific foundation for homeopathy.

French virologist Luc Montagnier stunned his colleagues at a prestigious international conference when he presented a new method for detecting viral infections that bore close parallels to the basic tenets of homeopathy.

Although fellow Nobel prize winners -- who view homeopathy as quackery -- were left openly shaking their heads, Montagnier's comments were rapidly embraced by homeopaths eager for greater credibility.

Montagnier told the conference last week that solutions containing the DNA of pathogenic bacteria and viruses, including HIV, "could emit low frequency radio waves" that induced surrounding water molecules to become arranged into "nanostructures". These water molecules, he said, could also emit radio waves.

He suggested water could retain such properties even after the original solutions were massively diluted, to the point where the original DNA had effectively vanished. In this way, he suggested, water could retain the "memory" of substances with which it had been in contact -- and doctors could use the emissions to detect disease.

To a lay person this may sound tenuous. For a scientist it is highly provocative in its similarity to the principles said to underpin homeopathy.

Homeopathic medicines work on the principle that a toxic substance taken in minute amounts will cure the same symptoms that it would cause if it were taken in large amounts.

Scientists completely reject this, claiming there is no evidence to show that water can retain or transmit information and that homeopathic treatments have never been proven in full clinical trials.

Montagnier's claims come at a particularly sensitive time, with the British Medical Association last week calling for the National Health Service to stop spending pound stg. 4 million ($7.2m) a year on homeopathy.

The growing concern of doctors is linked to homeopathy's rising popularity. Users of homeopathy include the Queen and David Beckham.

Montagnier was awarded the Nobel prize in 2008 for research carried out in the 1980s that confirmed the link between HIV and AIDS. The breakthrough opened the way to new treatments that have extended the lives of millions of people.

Last week, he was speaking at the Lindau Nobel laureate meeting in Germany where 60 Nobel prize winners had gathered, along with 700 other scientists, to discuss the latest breakthroughs in medicine, chemistry and physics.

Cristal Sumner, of the British Homeopathic Association, said Montagnier's work gave homeopathy "a true scientific ethos".

The Sunday Times

Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/nobel-laureate-gives-homeopathy-a-boost/story-e6frg8y6-1225887772305

Study reveals promise for HIV test

2010-06-16T01:13:00.001-05:00

Early detection hope of S.D. researchers

By Keith Darcé, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

Tuesday, June 15, 2010 at 12:05 a.m.

The evolution of AIDS from a deadly disease shrouded in fear to a largely manageable condition took another step forward Monday, when San Diego researchers unveiled results of a study looking at an early-detection method for the virus that causes the illness.

The report’s authors said a rarely used blood test can spot HIV weeks before the body recognizes the infection. They recommended that it be offered along with the more common screening method to people at high risk of contracting the virus, including gay men, intravenous drug users and people with multiple sex partners.

Among the 3,151 participants in a two-year study, the blood test identified HIV in 15 individuals who had falsely tested negative with the traditional saliva swab procedure.

False negative results occur in as much as 1 percent of those who take the swab test, which pinpoints antibodies produced by the immune system in response to infection. It can take as long as three months for the body to begin producing enough antibodies to trigger a positive reading.

During that lag time, people can unknowingly spread HIV through unsafe sex and miss early treatments that could improve their health in the long run, said Dr. Sheldon Morris, an AIDS researcher at the University of California San Diego’s Antiviral Research Center in Hillcrest.

Morris was lead author of the HIV-testing report, which appeared Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. His colleagues included other researchers from UCSD and San Diego County’s HIV, STD and Hepatitis Branch.

“If people got an antibody test alone and were told they weren’t infected when they were, they could be a strong infection risk until they get tested again, which according to guidelines could be six to 12 months later,” Morris said.

The latest findings reinforce similar conclusions from a 2005 study led by scientists at the University of North Carolina. Those researchers administered the early-detection blood test to a much larger sampling of people.

Participants in the San Diego study whose blood tested negative could get their results in person, through an automated telephone system or by logging on to a secured website. About 65 percent of those who sought their results used the automated options.

Morris said the pattern demonstrates a shift in attitudes about AIDS. The illness once was viewed as a death sentence that needed in-person counseling to deal with issues such as shame and secrecy. But advances in detection and treatment have turned it into a chronic, controllable condition for most patients — not unlike diabetes.

“HIV is not as mysterious as it once was,” Morris said.

The early-detection blood test, which homes in on nucleic acid RNA molecules produced by the virus, has been used to screen most of the nation’s blood donation supply since 2002, according to its maker, Gen-Probe of San Diego.

The FDA approved the test for use as an HIV diagnostic tool in late 2006, but its cost — as high as $100 — and more complicated administration have helped discourage widespread use, said Rowena Johnston, vice president and research director of the New York-based international HIV/AIDS research foundation known as AMFAR.

Samples for the blood test are obtained through finger pricks and must be sent to a laboratory, which can take up to two weeks to return results.

“The reason the antibody test is (widely) used is because of low cost and convenience,” Johnston said. The saliva swab method can produce a reading within a few minutes.

But identifying people with HIV within a few days or weeks of infection has become a public health imperative, in part because the virus level tends to be highest during the early infection stage — making transmission to others more likely, she said.

“This really is a key to preventing HIV transmission,” Johnston said.

Because of the blood test’s cost, health experts said, it probably isn’t practical to offer the higher-level screening to the general population. It makes more sense to focus on high-risk HIV groups because they record larger numbers of false-negative antibody test results.

In the San Diego study, participants were recruited from several HIV testing sites in the region, including those run by UCSD, the county and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center.

Each participant was given the saliva swab test, and then blood samples were taken from those who tested negative. The samples were sent to labs in San Diego and Emeryville in the Bay Area, where they were analyzed for HIV nucleic acid. Patients who tested positive for HIV after the blood analysis received the results from clinic staffers within a week.

Morris said the blood test is sensitive enough to detect the virus components within 10 days of infection.

“I think the time is coming where we will have to adopt a strategy for earlier (HIV) detection,” he said. “If you have a testing site with a high-risk prevalence, then you probably should be running this test on all of their samples” that tested negative for virus antibodies.

Keith Darcé: (619) 293-1020; keith.darce@uniontrib.com

See House of Numbers to learn more about HIV and AIDS.

Watch HIV scientists Dr. Niel Constantine and Robin Weiss talk about the accuracy of HIV Testing.

Watch Prof. Luc Montagnier, discoverer of HIV talk about clearing the virus naturally.

AIDS Budget Faces Reduction

2010-06-13T22:36:00.001-05:00

Prevention Efforts by Community Groups Face Cuts

By SUZANNE SATALINE And SHELLY BANJO

New York City's efforts to stem the spread of HIV/AIDS could shrink under the proposed cuts in the city budget, as the total number of new cases has been declining. But health officials are worried about a rise in HIV diagnoses among men who have sex with men.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg's budget proposal for the new fiscal year calls for slicing $428,000 from the current year's $14.6 million spent on HIV prevention efforts done under contracts with community-based organizations, officials with the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said. The cuts would amount to about a 3% reduction in dollars spent on AIDS prevention contracts for the fiscal year starting July 1.

Overall, new diagnoses of HIV and AIDS cases in the city fell between 2004 and 2008, the most recent figures available. The city logged 3,809 HIV diagnoses in 2008, compared with 4,186 in 2004, a 9% drop. The total number of people living with HIV/AIDS has risen nearly 10% in four years, to nearly 106,000 people in 2008.

While diagnoses overall have dropped, they are climbing among men who have sex with men. The city noted 1,614 cases of HIV among this group in 2008, up less than 1% from the previous year, but nearly 6% higher than in 2004, when that number was 1,527.

The city noted that 330 men in this group had concurrent AIDS diagnoses—a diagnosis within a month of a positive HIV test. That's an increase of 30 cases, or 1% more, than in 2007 and 18% more than 2004. Proportionately, more black and Hispanic men are affected in this category, health officials said.
Health officials and health-care workers say the rise has been caused by greater risk-taking among young men.

Men under the age of 30 "have no recollection'' of the 1980s, when contracting AIDS was a fast death sentence, said Monica Sweeney, the city's assistant health commissioner. "The fear factor is completely missing." Young men also have the false belief, she said, that if they contract AIDS, "all you have to do is take one pill a day.''

Harlem United, a social-services organization that relies on city funding to perform prevention work, said the $300,000 city grant it received has been used to train 120 volunteers to talk with men in online chat rooms, urging participants to get tested and to use condoms.

"You infiltrate the social network,'' said Sara Gillen, vice president for the group's prevention division. Over time, "we're training them to prepare them for a lifetime of prevention strategies," she said.
Nationwide, AIDS organizations have reported a sharp decrease in federal aid and donations. Part of the reason is donor fatigue: In New York, AIDS has moved from being viewed as an epidemic to an endemic problem, according to Len McNally, director of the NYC AIDS fund at the New York Community Trust.

The trust, the largest private funder of New York City nonprofits, saw private funding it receives for AIDS-related causes drop to $1.7 million in 2008 from $2.3 million in 2003.

Regarding the proposed budget cuts, a spokesman for the mayor's office said it doesn't tell each department what specifically to cut, and referred comments to the health department. A health department spokeswoman said: "We have to make cuts across the board. We're preserving the highest quality prevention programs."

Write to Suzanne Sataline at suzanne.sataline@wsj.com and Shelly Banjo at shelly.banjo@wsj.com

Watch House of Numbers to learn more about HIV and AIDS.

Fungus-tainted corn a factor in Africa HIV spread?

2010-06-09T23:27:00.001-05:00

(Reuters Health) - A new study raises the question of whether corn contaminated with a fungus-derived toxin is helping to facilitate the transmission of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.

Health

The toxins, called fumonisins, are produced by a particular type of fungus that can grow in corn after the plant is damaged by pests such as the cornstalk borer.

Fumonisins may be harmful to human health, with some studies linking consumption of the toxins to an increased rate of cancer of the esophagus, the tube that connects the throat to the stomach.

In the new study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers looked at whether there may be a relationship between HIV transmission in sub-Saharan Africa and general consumption of foods prone to contamination with fumonisins or other fungus- produced toxins (known as mycotoxins).

Using data from the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, the researchers found that as sub-Saharan countries' per-person corn consumption rose, so did HIV transmission rates.

In countries with a relatively higher percentage of Muslims -- a factor linked to lower HIV rates -- those with high per-capita corn consumption had an estimated HIV infection rate of 291 per 100,000 people in one year. In contrast, the rate in those with low corn consumption was 74 per 100,000 people.

Meanwhile, in countries with both fewer Muslims than average and higher-than-average corn consumption, there were 435 HIV cases per 100,000 people.

The researchers also found that higher per-capita corn consumption correlated with a higher rate of esophageal cancer. Since fumonisin toxins have been linked to that cancer, the finding serves as an indicator that populations with high corn consumption were exposed to higher levels of the toxin.

What all of this means is not yet clear. This appears to be the first study to find an association between corn consumption and HIV transmission rates in sub-Saharan Africa, lead researcher Dr. Jonathan H. Williams, of the University of Georgia in Griffin, told Reuters Health in an email.

The findings, he and his colleagues say, must be considered preliminary and need to be backed up by further research.

It is biologically plausible that high fumonisin intake could make a person more vulnerable to HIV infection. According to Williams, research suggests that the toxin makes certain tissues more vulnerable to infections by viruses.

A number of factors have been identified as key in sub-Saharan Africa's HIV transmission rates; male circumcision, for example, has been shown to lower heterosexual transmission, while having multiple concurrent sex partners or other sexually transmitted infections increases the risk.

The current findings raise the possibility that food safety -- in particular, the issue of fumonisin-contaminated corn -- is an additional factor.

Based on their statistical model, Williams and his colleagues estimate that if the "maize (corn) factor" were eliminated in sub-Saharan Africa, HIV transmissions could be cut by as much as 58 percent.
Contamination might be prevented, for instance, by planting corn varieties genetically modified to be resistant to pests. It may also be possible to remove contaminants, Williams said, through certain milling technologies or by soaking the grain in water; fumonisin is water-soluble, so "steeping" the grain or meal, then discarding the liquid may remove the toxin.

In a region where an estimated 1.7 million people become infected with HIV annually, that would mean more than 1 million infections averted each year, the researchers note.

All of that, however, remains speculation until further research is done confirming the link between contaminated corn and HIV.

SOURCE: link.reuters.com/bad29k American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, online May 19, 2010.

Article Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65848I20100609

Watch House of Numbers to learn more about HIV and AIDS.

Click here to see Luc Montagnier's views on clearing HIV naturally.

House of Numbers now available on iTunes and Amazon.com

Meharry, ministers team up to fight HIV/AIDS in Nashville

2010-06-08T23:43:00.000-05:00

Federal grants to support programs

By Andy Humbles • THE TENNESSEAN • June 7, 2010

HIV and AIDS isn’t an easy subject for churches.

“I think HIV and AIDS is a more difficult challenge because of the necessity of addressing human sexuality that, in many instances, there has been a reluctance for many churches to deal with,’’ said Metropolitan Interdenominational founder and Senior Servant, the Rev. Edwin Sanders.

Two federal grants, one to Metropolitan Interdenominational Church and one to Meharry Medical College, are designed to put churches and faith leaders in a position of leadership in the battle against HIV and AIDS.

Both are recipients of a Capacity Building grant from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Each grant will total nearly $2 million over five years.

Metropolitan Interdenominational and Meharry will operate independent models, but each with a heavy emphasis to equip clergy with the skills and expertise to establish successful HIV and AIDS prevention programs.

The grants are designed to involve health providers and Historically Black Colleges and Universities as well.

“The church needs to be involved on several levels,’’ said the Rev. Sherman Tribble, pastor of New Visions Baptist in Donelson. “One is spreading the news that’s it’s an equal opportunity disease. Anyone who is human has the possibility of getting it.

But that there is also healing and hope. Who can say that better than the church?’’

It’s the third time Metropolitan Interdenominational has gotten a CDC grant. The church has been active in HIV and AIDS prevention for about 25 years now. Its first CDC grant was for four years and the second was for five. It’s Meharry’s first CDC grant of this kind.

The goal is to ultimately decrease AIDS and HIV numbers among African-Americans, which statistically has higher rates of infection in this country.

Metropolitan Interdenominational and Meharry work independently, but there will be collaboration.

‘Clergy Circles’’
A primary component of the Capacity Building grant has been to hold summits and forums all over the country on HIV and AIDS prevention strategies that will attract clergy to attend. The goal is to establish “clergy circles,’’ who will participate in a five-part curriculum based program.

The summits can attract 100-150 clergy and from those events hopes are about 30 will continue in the clergy circles.

“At the end of the curriculum-based program we hope we have established a level of commitment that will be sustainable,’’ Sanders said.

The present grant will continue establishing clergy circles with more intent on drawing from a regional area.

At the end of the last grant cycle Metropolitan Baptist had worked in 23 states, with programs established in Birmingham, Chicago, Clarksville, Savannah, Ga., Memphis and more.
The outreach is called MICTAN (Metropolitan Church Technical Assistance Network).
Sanders and MICTAN staff have most recently worked on establishment of a regional project in Rochester N.Y.

Another component of the church’s Capacity Building grant goes toward a relationship with divinity schools to help train future clergy. Metropolitan Interdenominational has primarily worked with the Howard University School of Divinity in Washington D.C. and American Baptist College in Nashville.
The church, with a congregation of about 350 on Sunday, has been active in numerous causes, including AIDS and HIV work.

One is a primary care clinic for HIV positive persons, funded by the church and Health Resource Service Administration under the Health and Human Services Department. The Capacity Building money does not go to the primary care clinic.

Project SAVED
Meharry’s model, named Project SAVED ((Strengthening Access Via Empowerment and Diligence), has a 22-member advisory committee of ministers, health care providers and historically Black College leaders to work in an 11-state Southern region.

These advisers will engage their communities in the 11-state region around the HIV and AIDS issue to develop new prevention programs, activities and testing opportunities.

Southern region states are Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico.

Dr. Jacqueline Hampton, is the director of the Community Outreach Core at Meharry’s Center for AIDS Health Disparities Research. Hampton is the Project SAVED director and sought and attained the grant.

"We should see more communities addressing the issue,’’ Hampton said. “When you see more communities addressing HIV, hopefully you see decreased incidents.’’

Hampton felt Meharry’s location, the work its Center for AIDS Health Disparities Research has done and connections made with them ideally situated it to launch Project SAVED.

“We would have been remiss if we didn’t apply for the grant,’’ Hampton said. “What were trying to do is to grow the sphere of influence. We’re trying to penetrate areas that haven’t been penetrated.’’

Advisory committee members will engage other community stakeholders to train and enhance Core team members represent other areas of the region and travel to meet and conduct workshops.
One adviser is Sheila Dennie, the program coordinator for the National Minority AIDS Education and Training Center at Meharry, which is a separate program from Project SAVED.

“The community engagement model adds validity to the voice of the community,’’ Sheila Dennie, an adviser.

Tribble is among local pastors on the advisory team Meharry has established.

“Sometimes those from the medical community don’t have access to people in the faith community and sometimes we don’t have access to the medical community,’’ Tribble said. “It’s rare for a medical school to get involved … We may see it one way and other service providers see it another. But we’re all doing our part."
Source: http://www.tennessean.com/article/20100607/DAVIDSON/100607058/Meharry-ministers-team-up-to-fight-HIV/AIDS-in-Nashville-

Note: House of Numbers premiered at the Nashville Film Festival in 2009.
Click here to read the Tennessean Review of HoN

House of Numbers Adds Additional Content to its Deluxe Edition DVD

2010-06-07T23:45:00.003-05:00

House of Numbers has added full interviews to its Deluxe Edition DVD along with additional featurettes. A list of all the featurettes can be seen below and a list of full length interviews will be announced shortly.

Deluxe DVD Special Features

Behind-the-scenes: The Making of House of Numbers

Extended Interviews

32 Featurettes:

HIV Testing

HIV Testing 101
False Positives: Causes and Factors
History and Evolution of HIV Testing
Reading the Fine Print: HIV Test Inserts
The Changing Criteria of Western Blot Testing
Deciphering Test Results for False Positives
Examining the "Gold Standard" for HIV Tests
Testing of High Risk vs. Low Risk Populations
HIV Testing Campaigns

A I D S

CDC: Initial AIDS Definition
Creating an African AIDS Definition
Bangui: AIDS By Numbers
Bangui: Peripheral Psychological Damage
Bangui Redux: National Variation in AIDS Definitions
Through a Glass Darkly: African AIDS Statistics
Clinical AIDS: A New Disease?
A Growing Family: AIDS Marker Diseases and Indicators
Bangui Westernized
Politics and Public Health: A Study in Conflict
CD4 T-Cell Count Marker: Medical Application
1997 - CDC Tables 11 and 12: Addition by Subtraction

Deconstructing a House of Numbers:
Experts Examine Global HIV/AIDS Statistics

Dr. James Chin
Rian Malan
Dr. Charles Geshekter (Archival, 2001)

A Second Look

The "Probable Cause" of AIDS
Dr. Don Francis on Dr. Robert Gallo
Profile: Dr. Peter Duesberg

"Why I Began Questioning HIV" -
Five Skeptics' Stories

Dr. Kary Mullis
Rian Malan
Neville Hodgkinson
Dr. Rodney Richards
Dr. Christian Fiala

Click Here To Purchase the DVD

“HOUSE OF NUMBERS” NOW AVAILABLE ACROSS NORTH AMERICA ON VIDEO ON DEMAND

2010-06-03T13:28:00.000-05:00

Los Angeles, CA – June 3, 2010 – It was announced today that the acclaimed HIV / AIDS documentary House of Numbers is now available in over 50 million North American homes with access to video on demand (VOD) offerings. Cable, satellite and telco operators playing the film in the United States include Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Charter, Verizon, Cablevision, DIRECTV, DISH Network, RCN, Insight, Mediacom, and Suddenlink.

In Canada the film will be available to digital subscribers of Rogers, Videotron, Cogeco, Shaw and Telus. House of Numbers will also be available through Apple iTunes and on Amazon VOD.

One of the most buzzed about independent films of the year – the critically acclaimed and divisive HIV/AIDS documentary premiered theatrically in January 2010 but began making waves over a year earlier as it screened on the film festival circuit to tremendously curious audiences around the world, wanting to see a film that showcases how the HIV/AIDS story is being rewritten.

House of Numbers presents the uncensored POVs of virtually all the notable players in the HIV / AIDS world; in their own settings, in their own words. It rocks the foundation upon which all conventional wisdom regarding HIV/AIDS is based. The documentary raises new questions -- presenting global and conflicting viewpoints from an unprecedented array of over 30 of the most prominent and influential figures in the field, among them Nobel Laureates, the co-discoverers of HIV, Presidential advisors, the former Executive Director of UNAIDS, as well as survivors and activists. Surprising revelations and stunning contradictions are the result.

Commented director Brett Leung “We’re are very excited that audiences across North America will have easy access to experience ‘House of Numbers’. We believe Video on Demand is a great medium to further the ongoing discussion around the film.”

About the film:

What is HIV? What is AIDS? What is being done to cure it? These questions sent Canadian filmmaker Brent Leung on a worldwide journey, from the highest echelons of the medical research establishment to the slums of South Africa, where death and disease are the order of the day. In this up-to-the-minute documentary, he observes that although AIDS has been front-page news for over 28 years, it is barely understood. Despite the great effort, time, and money spent, no cure is in sight.

The film unveils candid conversations on several key points: Why does the definition of AIDS change from country to country and over time? Why do esteemed scientists debate over the HIV virus? Are HIV tests reliable globally? Are the worldwide statistics correct? What are the dangers of the drug treatments?

Scientists and prominent figures featured in House of Numbers include: Professor Luc Montagnier MD, 2008 Nobel Prize winner for discovering the HIV virus, David Baltimore PhD, 1975 Nobel Prize winner; Kenneth Cole, Chairman of AMFAR; James Curran MD, who began his career with the CDC and held leadership positions for the CDC's HIV/AIDs research; Anthony S Fauci, Director of NIAID; Robert Gallo MD, PhD, co-discoverer of the HIV virus; Michael Gottlieb MD, credited as first doctor to diagnose AIDS; and Peter Piot MD, PhD, Director of Institute of Global Health and former Executive Director of UNAIDS.

First-time filmmaker, Brent Leung, grew up as part of the "AIDS generation" - he's never known a world without it. Yet with all of its notoriety, he realized the average person did not know that much about HIV and AIDS. What began as a 15-minute film project built around the simple question "What is HIV/AIDS?" revealed itself to be a much deeper journey. House of Numbers became a multi-faceted project that took him across five continents. Leung reveals a research establishment in disarray, and health policy gone tragically off course.

More information on the film can be found at www.houseofnumbers.com.

Contacts

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8687 Melrose Ave

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FDA Panel Gives Thumbs Up for Egrifta

2010-05-28T16:46:00.000-05:00

From Medscape Medical News

Fran Lowry

May 28, 2010 — The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Endocrinologic and Metabolic Drugs Advisory Committee has unanimously endorsed approval of tesamorelin acetate (Egrifta; Theratechnologies, Inc, Montreal) to induce and maintain a reduction of excess visceral abdominal fat in HIV-infected patients with lipodystrophy.

The committee based its approval on data presented by the sponsor that showed that 57% of patients taking tesamorelin experienced an 8% or greater reduction in abdominal fat compared with 29% of patients taking placebo.

The panel was also positively swayed by "compelling" testimony by 2 HIV-positive patients who told them how devastating it was to live with the unsightly accumulation of belly fat — an adverse effect of antiretroviral therapy — that immediately labeled them as "AIDS patients."

One by one, the 16 members of the panel gave their reasons for their yes votes. All said the sponsor clearly proved what they had set out to prove.

"I voted yes and it was an easy decision. The sponsor was asked to show a reduction of visceral adipose tissue and they did that," said Abraham Thomas, MD, MPH, division head of endocrinology, diabetes, bone and mineral disorders, Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit, Michigan. "They showed an improvement in patients' perception of their body image, that patients felt better about their appearance. That's what they were asked to do and they did that very well in their series of clinical trials."

Clifford J. Rosen, MD, director of clinical and translational research and senior scientist at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute in Scarborough, also found that the decision to endorse tesamorelin was an easy one to make. He added that, in the short term at least, "there are few safety issues, so I didn't feel uncomfortable. This was not a hard choice."

Safety Concerns: IGF-1, Diabetes Risk

But the panel did have safety concerns. Among them were concerns about increases in insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), which may promote tumor growth.

"I am very concerned about IGF-1," Dr. Rosen said. "There must be some way of labeling about frequent monitoring of IGF-1 levels. I think this is going to be a long-term issue. Currently, it's hypothetical, but it is a concern and both the patient and the prescribing physician should be aware of this."

Earlier in the day, some panel members had also expressed concerns about the increased risk for diabetes with tesamorelin. However, by the time it came to a vote, the panel felt that the benefits of the drug outweighed the risk.

"I harped a lot about diabetes and the risk factors, but I don't think we should be restricting people with HIV who have diabetes," Dr. Thomas said. "If someone has diabetes and is well controlled, that person should have an opportunity because they are suffering the same psychological issues of body image and being identified in the community as being on HIV treatment."

A similar opinion was expressed by David S. Schade, MD, professor of medicine and chief, Division of Endocrinology, University of New Mexico School of Medicine, Albuquerque.

"If this drug does not cause deterioration of glucose control, then it ought to be used in patients with diabetes. We should not exclude them," Dr. Schade said. "I would recommend that the FDA not include any language about excluding patients with diabetes. They can certainly say that there is no data supporting the use of this in diabetes, but I would hate to see all my diabetic patients potentially being excluded from this medication."

Prescribing Guidelines Requested

Panel members also asked the FDA to come up with guidelines for clinicians in prescribing tesamorelin.

"As a clinician, I would like some specific criteria on when to stop Egrifta if the patient is not responding," said Princy N. Kumar, MD, professor of medicine and microbiology, Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington, DC. "At what point, and with what measurements, do we say to a patient, 'you are not responding, we have given it to you for so many months and you are not going to respond any further'? I would like very concrete information on when to stop."

George A. Bishopric, MD, from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who was the patient representative on the panel, commented that the degree of suffering that HIV patients with lipodystrophy experience, as well as the fact that there is no other agent for this indication, warranted approval. "We all want follow-up for cardiovascular issues, IGF-1, diabetes, and this will have to be done in postmarketing studies, but I am very happy that it passed."

"There is no question that lipodystrophy causes a fair amount of psychological distress, as well as difficulty in functioning. It has been associated with depression, and depression has been incontrovertibly associated with poor adherence and poor outcomes in disease progression," said Vicki Cargill, MD, director of minority research, Office of AIDS Research, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.

Dr. Cargill added that a registry or another form of postmarketing surveillance is needed, and other panel members agreed.

"The population in this study were mostly Caucasian and do not reflect the population that is heavily impacted by the epidemic, so it would be important to see data in such a population," she said.
The panel also debated whether reducing abdominal fat translated into a reduction in cardiovascular disease risk.

"The issue with regard to cardiovascular outcomes is certainly not shown at all by the sponsor, and we have no clue whether there is an adverse cardiovascular outcome or a benefit by reducing belly fat," said Mark E. Molitch, MD, professor of medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois. "This deserves study, whether through some registry or prospective placebo-controlled trials, which I prefer, but which might be difficult to do."

Source: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/722647

See House of Numbers to learn more about HIV Drugs

Remembering AIDS 2000 – Hope and Controversy in Durban

2010-05-26T03:01:00.000-05:00

by Joe DeCapua

While much attention is being paid to South Africa as the host of Africa’s first World Cup, the nation also made history 10 years ago when it hosted the 13^th International AIDS Conference. It was the first time the world’s largest AIDS gathering was held in a developing country and it changed the way future conferences would be held.

The theme of the 13^th International AIDS Conference was “Break the Silence.” And at the opening ceremony in Durban, performers chanted “No” to the fear and reluctance to talk openly about HIV/AIDS, which had already killed millions.

Monumental task

The conference – known as AIDS 2000 – faced many obstacles. Could an African country host an international conference attracting thousands of participants? Would South Africa’s high crime rate scare people away? Would the idea of focusing more on the social aspects of the disease be successful?

We have a monumental task ahead of us. And there’s not a second to look back to our yesterdays, to look back at our fears and frustrations. We have no other choice but to go forward and to keep our minds on acting firmly on the knowledge we already have; and of uncovering new ideas and new knowledge on what should be done.”

AIDS 2000 chairman, Professor Gerry Coovadia, speaking on opening day, July 9^th, 2000. Today, Dr. Coovadia, Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics and Child Health at the University of KwaZulu-Natal , considers the legacy of the conference.

“Without exaggerating its impact, it certainly is considered one of the landmark AIDS conferences in the world. And that includes those that have been held recently. And I think the reason it is considered a landmark conference is that quite a number of issues came to the fore,” he said.

Denial

Controversy surrounded the Durban AIDS conference even before it opened. President Thabo Mbeki was at the center of it, skeptical a virus was the cause of HIV/AIDS. He said his position was based, in part, on a World Health Organization report that outlined the many health problems facing South Africa and other nations on the continent. Mbeki also said poverty was a major contributor to poor health.

It seemed to me that we could not blame everything on a single virus. It seemed to me also that every living African, whether in good or ill health, is prey to many enemies of health that would interact one upon the other in many ways within one human body,” said Mbeki.

Critics feared if President Mbeki appeared to doubt the link between HIV and the disease, people would not practice safe sex and use condoms.

“One of the questions I’ve asked is: are safe sex, condoms and antiretroviral drugs a sufficient response to the health catastrophes that we face?”

The debate and anger over the issue drew the attention of former South African President Nelson Mandela, who spoke at the closing ceremonies.

“So much unnecessary attention around this conference had been directed towards the dispute that is unintentionally distracting from the real life and death issues we are confronted with as a country,” said Mandela.

He said it would be wrong for the controversy to overshadow the goals of the 13^th international AIDS Conference.

“This is not an academic conference. This is, as I understand it, a gathering of human beings concerned about turning around one of the greatest threats humankind has faced. And certainly, the greatest after the end of the great wars of the previous century,” Mandela said.

Professor Coovadia recalls Mbeki’s denial of the virus link and its consequences. “He disputed the efficacy of some of the (antiretroviral) drugs, which is in a way just as bad or even worse - because it prevented access to drugs, which could have been affordable at least to South Africa,” he said.

In the end, the words of Nelson Mandela became a battle cry for many at the Conference. “In the face of the great threat posed by HIV/AIDS, we have to rise above our differences and combine our efforts to save our people…. Let us not equivocate. A tragedy of unprecedented proportion is unfolding in Africa,” he said.

Professor Coovadia said Mandel’s words affected him personally.

“I came as close to weeping as I possibly could. And I think more than that, you may not remember, there was an absolute, unqualified and spontaneous standing ovation for what Mr. Mandela said.
However, Coovadia describes the fight against HIV/AIDS during the Mbeki administration as the “worst years.” He says government policies delayed needed treatment and misinformed and confused the public.

Coovadia now serves on President Zuma’s 26-member National Planning Commission.
Many consider AIDS 2000 as the first major conference to put a human face on the epidemic. UNAIDS estimates about 60 million people worldwide have been infected with HIV since the epidemic began about 30 years ago. About 25 million have died from HIV-related illnesses. The vast majority of those living with and dying from HIV/AIDS are in sub-Saharan Africa.

The next International AIDS Conference, the 18^th, will be held in Vienna July 18^th through the 23^rd.

Watch House of Numbers to see more on the 2000 AIDS Conference and the AIDS debate.

Suspended Over Naughty Words in H.I.V. Class, Teacher Wins U.S. Ruling

2010-05-20T22:18:00.000-05:00

Published: May 20, 2010
By SHARON OTTERMAN

A Staten Island middle school teacher who was removed from the classroom after allowing her eighth graders to use vulgar terms during a lesson on H.I.V. won her first battle against the city in federal court on Thursday, when a judge overruled a city effort to dismiss her case.

On Feb. 6, 2008, the teacher, Faith Kramer, a health and physical education teacher at Intermediate School 72 on Staten Island, taught a state-mandated lesson on the various behaviors that can transmit H.I.V./AIDS. According to legal documents filed with the case, she wrote down the polite words for sexual organs, sexual acts and bodily fluids on the board — and then asked her students to list any other terms they might know for those things.

In doing so, the judge ruled, she appeared to be following the spirit of a state syllabus that directed that students be encouraged to use sexual terms that they understood, so that they could relate those words to the more formal terminology. “If students use different terms,” the syllabus says, “make sure they understand the relationship between both sets of terms.”

Ms. Kramer argued that she did not ask students to write the resulting slang words, euphemisms and vulgarities in their notebooks, but some did. As a result, some of Ms. Kramer’s 30 students went home with neatly transcribed lists of off-color words for sexual acts and body parts, including two Yiddishisms for the male sexual organ. At least one parent called the school to complain, court documents state.

The next day, Peter Macellari, the principal, requested that school officials open an investigation into the episode, and the Department of Education removed Ms. Kramer, a 26-year veteran teacher with a clean disciplinary record, from the classroom, the court documents state. She was informed by letter that she was being investigated for “corporal punishment” and was sent to an administrative detention center, known colloquially as a “rubber room,” where she continued to receive her salary.

The city investigation found that Ms. Kramer had violated a regulation that prohibited verbal abuse, or discipline “by use of language that tends to cause fear, physical or mental distress.” But no formal charges were ever brought, and Mr. Macellari returned Ms. Kramer last September to the classroom, where she continues to teach health. In March, she filed a federal suit against the city seeking $1 million in damages for mental anguish, lawyer’s fees and the loss of extra after-school work.

In his ruling, Judge Jack B. Weinstein of the United States District Court in Brooklyn wrote that the city violated the due process clause of the 14th Amendment by not providing Ms. Kramer with a reasonable opportunity to know that her lesson plan was inappropriate before removing her from the classroom. Neither the corporal punishment nor the verbal abuse regulations were properly applied, because she was trying to teach, not punish students, he wrote.

“Her lesson was in compliance with all of the guidelines with which she had been provided,” said Duane C. Felton, Ms. Kramer’s lawyer, on Thursday. The next step, he said, will be to meet with the city lawyers to see if a financial settlement can be reached.

In a statement, Blanche Greenfield, a senior city lawyer, said that the words the students used, some of which she repeated in the statement, were “entirely inappropriate.”

“Their use in the classroom reflects unacceptable and extremely poor judgment by the teacher and is plainly not consistent with community values,” Ms. Greenfield said.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/nyregion/21ruling.html

See House of Numbers to learn more about HIV and AIDS.
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Tuberculosis most deadly of 'neglected' diseases

2010-05-18T20:24:00.004-05:00

PARIS — More than nine out of ten cases of tuberculosis, which kills 1.8 million people each year, could be averted by 2050 with better testing, drugs and vaccines, according to a major review released Wednesday.

Treatment from 1995 to 2008 saved six million lives, according to the review, published in the British medical journal The Lancet. But TB remains a deadly scourge that fails to attract as many health dollars, euros and yen as other diseases claiming as many or fewer victims, the journal said.

"Tuberculosis is unfashionable these days," said Lesotho Health Minister Mphu Ramatlapeng at a press conference in Geneva, where the report was unveiled at the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Some 36 million people infected with TB during 1995-2008 were cured and incidence of the lung-wasting disease has begun to regress, but only by about one percent per year.

The most urgent -- and most easily remedied -- problem is poor diagnosis, the report said.
More than 80 percent of all TB cases occur in only 22 countries, including nine in Africa, 11 in Asia, and Russia.

Detection rates have improved over the last 15 years, but nearly 40 percent of active infections in those nations still go untreated.

Even worse, only a quarter of the estimated 1.4 million people infected with both tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS have been identified, the study reported. HIV increases the risk of TB 20 fold.
Up to two-thirds of cases in South Africa and Zimbabwe, for example, are thought to be caused by HIV co-infection.

Frequent testing for HIV and the early start of antiretroviral treatment (ART) would help cut incidence by reducing the number of people with compromised immune systems, it said.

Another looming threat are so-called "multidrug-resistant" (MDR) forms of TB.
Most types of tuberculosis can be cured with ten euros (13 dollars) worth of medicine if diagnosed early.
But when patients fail to complete a treatment, the Mycobacterium tuberculosis germ that causes the disease develops a resistance to frontline drugs such as isoniazid and rifampicin.
Treating the new superbugs costs thousands of dollars (euros) and can take up to two years, and even then may fail.

"Without significant investment in technology and capacity for prevention, diagnosis and treatment, MDR-TB threatens to become the dominant strain of TB over the next few decades," the study warns.
"The future possibility of strains that are totally resistant to all anti-tuberculosis drugs is not inconceivable."

In 2008, some 440,000 cases of MDR-TB occurred worldwide, half of them in China and India. Only seven percent, however, of these infections were treated.

Turning back the tide on TB will require boosting basic health care infrastructure and targeted prevention measures, including improved vaccines, better use of antibiotics and reduction of risk factors.

There remains a "desperate need" for a more accurate, cheaper test for detection, and for so-called "biomarkers" that predict whether an individual is more likely to be cured by treatment or to relapse, and whether vaccines will work.

All of this takes money, which has fallen far short of needs: the funding gap in high-burden countries -- measured against the Global Plan to Stop TB -- is some half-a-billion dollars in 2010, the study reports.

"Tuberculosis can no longer be the neglected sister of HIV and malaria," the authors say, pointing out that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) spend about seven percent as much on TB research as for HIV, even though both diseases kill roughly the same number of people worldwide.

Article source: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ju30K5Rm2Cz5OiTTziA3Kt8w6vqw

See House of Numbers to learn more about HIV and AIDS.

Santa Cruz Festival Juror Matt Norman Praises House of Numbers

2010-05-13T13:54:00.000-05:00

Santa Cruz Film Festival Juror Matt Norman weighs in with his reaction following his screening of House of Numbers.

"This film truly demonstrates why documentary film is important. Whether you believe in the conspiracy or not, the filmmaker went out and made a statement. A very dangerous statement that can cause an amazing amount of conversations. This film stands out on its own purely because I was asking questions for over a week with other people about their own thoughts on AIDS. When a filmmaker has the guts to "ASK A QUESTION AGAINST THE NORM" then it's the audience that has to answer that question. The proof was there but still you had to wonder who the scientists were that gave the proof. Which has certainly opened my eyes to ask the question 'What if this film holds the real truth'? For me that makes this my favorite film."

House of Numbers is nominated for Best Documentary. Winners will be announced at the Closing Ceremony on Saturday, May 15, 2010.

Visit Matt's site: http://www.wingmanpictures.com/#/homepage/ and check out his award winning film Salute.

Matthew Travis "Matt" Norman is an actor turned filmmaker, best known for his acting work on Australian TV Shows Blue Heelers, Neighbours and Stingers, U.S telemovies Moby-Dick, Silver Strand and Ghost Rider. (Source: Wikipedia)

President Obama on the Scientific Method

2010-05-12T21:55:00.004-05:00

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/text_of_remarks_of_president_barack_obama/

Excerpt from President Obama’s remarks on stem cell research and scientific integrity, given at the White House.

"But let’s be clear: promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it is also about protecting free and open inquiry. It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient — especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda — and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology."

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Ensuring America’s continued global leadership in scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs.

Today, with the Executive Order I am about to sign, we will bring the change that so many scientists and researchers; doctors and innovators; patients and loved ones have hoped for, and fought for, these past eight years: we will lift the ban on federal funding for promising embryonic stem cell research. We will vigorously support scientists who pursue this research. And we will aim for America to lead the world in the discoveries it one day may yield.

At this moment, the full promise of stem cell research remains unknown, and it should not be overstated. But scientists believe these tiny cells may have the potential to help us understand, and possibly cure, some of our most devastating diseases and conditions. To regenerate a severed spinal cord and lift someone from a wheelchair. To spur insulin production and spare a child from a lifetime of needles. To treat Parkinson’s, cancer, heart disease and others that affect millions of Americans and the people who love them.

But that potential will not reveal itself on its own. Medical miracles do not happen simply by accident. They result from painstaking and costly research — from years of lonely trial and error, much of which never bears fruit — and from a government willing to support that work. From life-saving vaccines, to pioneering cancer treatments, to the sequencing of the human genome — that is the story of scientific progress in America. When government fails to make these investments, opportunities are missed. Promising avenues go unexplored. Some of our best scientists leave for other countries that will sponsor their work. And those countries may surge ahead of ours in the advances that transform our lives.

But in recent years, when it comes to stem cell research, rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values. In this case, I believe the two are not inconsistent. As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering. I believe we have been given the capacity and will to pursue this research — and the humanity and conscience to do so responsibly.

It is a difficult and delicate balance. Many thoughtful and decent people are conflicted about, or strongly oppose, this research. I understand their concerns, and we must respect their point of view.
But after much discussion, debate and reflection, the proper course has become clear. The majority of Americans — from across the political spectrum, and of all backgrounds and beliefs — have come to a consensus that we should pursue this research. That the potential it offers is great, and with proper guidelines and strict oversight, the perils can be avoided.

That is a conclusion with which I agree. That is why I am signing this Executive Order, and why I hope Congress will act on a bi-partisan basis to provide further support for this research. We are joined today by many leaders who have reached across the aisle to champion this cause, and I commend them for that work.

Ultimately, I cannot guarantee that we will find the treatments and cures we seek. No President can promise that. But I can promise that we will seek them — actively, responsibly, and with the urgency required to make up for lost ground. Not just by opening up this new frontier of research today, but by supporting promising research of all kinds, including groundbreaking work to convert ordinary human cells into ones that resemble embryonic stem cells.

I can also promise that we will never undertake this research lightly. We will support it only when it is both scientifically worthy and responsibly conducted. We will develop strict guidelines, which we will rigorously enforce, because we cannot ever tolerate misuse or abuse. And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society.

This Order is an important step in advancing the cause of science in America. But let’s be clear: promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it is also about protecting free and open inquiry. It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient — especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda — and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.

By doing this, we will ensure America’s continued global leadership in scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs. That is essential not only for our economic prosperity, but for the progress of all humanity.

That is why today, I am also signing a Presidential Memorandum directing the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making. To ensure that in this new Administration, we base our public policies on the soundest science; that we appoint scientific advisors based on their credentials and experience, not their politics or ideology; and that we are open and honest with the American people about the science behind our decisions. That is how we will harness the power of science to achieve our goals — to preserve our environment and protect our national security; to create the jobs of the future, and live longer, healthier lives.

As we restore our commitment to science, and expand funding for promising stem cell research, we owe a debt of gratitude to so many tireless advocates, some of whom are with us today, many of whom are not. Today, we honor all those whose names we don’t know, who organized, and raised awareness, and kept on fighting — even when it was too late for them, or for the people they love. And we honor those we know, who used their influence to help others and bring attention to this cause — people like Christopher and Dana Reeve, who we wish could be here to see this moment.

One of Christopher’s friends recalled that he hung a sign on the wall of the exercise room where he did his grueling regimen of physical therapy. It read: “For everyone who thought I couldn’t do it. For everyone who thought I shouldn’t do it. For everyone who said, ‘It’s impossible.’ See you at the finish line.”

Christopher once told a reporter who was interviewing him: “If you came back here in ten years, I expect that I’d walk to the door to greet you.”

Christopher did not get that chance. But if we pursue this research, maybe one day — maybe not in our lifetime, or even in our children’s lifetime — but maybe one day, others like him might.
There is no finish line in the work of science. The race is always with us — the urgent work of giving substance to hope and answering those many bedside prayers, of seeking a day when words like “terminal” and “incurable” are potentially retired from our vocabulary.

Today, using every resource at our disposal, with renewed determination to lead the world in the discoveries of this new century, we rededicate ourselves to this work.
Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless America.

Watch House of Numbers to learn more about the scientific AIDS debate.

10 Reasons Why Black People Should Not Take The HIV Tests!

2010-05-06T21:27:00.000-05:00

Source: http://www.blacknews.com/news/why_black_people_should_not_take_hiv_tests101.shtml

By Curtis Cost

Black AIDS organizations, as well as some Black Clergy, Black politicians and Black sports figures have been encouraging African Americans to take HIV tests and to take HIV/AIDS drugs. In making these recommendations it is clear that these individuals and groups have failed to research the debate over the validity of the HIV tests and whether HIV is really the cause of AIDS.
On the other hand, doctors, scientists and researchers for years have been challenging the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. Few in the Black community have heard their objections. The following is a brief summary of the controversy:

1. None of the manufacturers of the HIV tests guarantee the accuracy of their tests. In fact, they warn that their tests should not be used alone to determine if someone is HIV positive or negative. If the manufacturers of the HIV tests don't have confidence in their own product then why should Black People?

2. There are about 70 different things that can trigger a false positive result on HIV tests. These include vaccines such as for flu, hepatitis B and others. YES, if you recently had a vaccine, it can cause you to test positive on an HIV test! Even pregnancy can trigger a false positive response on an HIV test.

3. Test results vary over time. That is, you can test positive one day and go back to the same hospital or clinic a year later and test negative!

4. Test results vary between hospitals. You can go to two different hospitals on the same day and take an HIV test and get two different test results!

5. Test results vary between countries. There is no international standard on how to even interpret the results on an HIV test. This means that you could test positive in America, but in Australia your same test result could be considered negative!

6. Test results vary depending on which test kit is used. This means that an ELISA test could indicate that you are positive, but a Western Blot test or PCR test could indicate that you are negative.

7. The HIV tests do not look for HIV in your body. The tests just look for chemical reactions which have never been proven to have anything to do with HIV. This is why doctors will say that you are HIV positive, but they will not state in writing that you have an active infection of HIV. There is a big difference between being HIV positive and actually having HIV!

8. The personal information you give at a testing facility will have a big impact on how they interpret the test results. That is, if you say that you are a homosexual or an intravenous drug user, this will drastically increase the chances that they will claim that you have HIV.

9. If you are told you are HIV positive this will have a devastating emotional impact on you and your family. Even worse, if you start taking drugs like AZT, DDI and protease inhibitors you will be poisoning yourself and most likely die a slow horrible death. AZT for example was originally a chemotherapy treatment, but in 1964 it was deemed too deadly and its use was discontinued. It destroys the bone marrow which is where a person's blood cells are formed! Therefore, people who supposedly have an immune system problem are being given a drug which destroys their immune system!

10. No HIV virus has ever been isolated. The early claims of isolation have been proven false and turned out to be nothing more than cellular debris! Even the person who supposedly discovered HIV, French scientist and Nobel Prize winner, Luc Montagnier, has publicly admitted that he never obtained a purified sample of HIV. This means that all of the HIV tests are worthless because there is no purified sample of HIV which can be used to measure the accuracy of those tests. It also means that all of the HIV/AIDS drugs are worthless because they are based on a virus that nobody has ever isolated. This is why scores of prominent doctors and scientists have been denouncing the HIV/AIDS hypothesis as a hoax!

We in the African American Community must wake-up and start thinking for ourselves! We must take a serious look at the debate over HIV/AIDS and start asking serious questions. We can not afford to passively rely on the recommendations of others. Those who are in a leadership position in the Black Community need to do critical research before continuing to make recommendations which are taking our people down the wrong path.

Curtis Cost is the author of the new book: "Vaccines Are Dangerous - A Warning to the Global Community 2nd Edition" which discusses the HIV/AIDS debate. His book is available at: www.vaccinesaredangerous.com, Amazon.com, and other book outlets. Mr. Cost has been featured in Ebony Magazine, The New York Times, The Village Voice and Tony Brown's Journal among others. Video clips of his lectures can be seen on YouTube.

PRESS CONTACT:
The Secrets Publishing
(347) 220-1149 or (407) 361-3122
curtiscost@gmail.com

Watch House of Numbers to learn more about HIV Testing

AIDS fraud: The Marketing of an Epidemic exposed in House of Numbers exclusive film clip

2010-05-02T22:39:00.000-05:00

(NaturalNews) The global AIDS epidemic being pushed by the AIDS industry is a fraud. Key pioneers from the industry now speak out against "the false marketing of the AIDS epidemic" in an exclusive video clip from the highly controversial documentary House of Numbers (www.HouseOfNumber.com).

Watch the clip right now at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfnY...

"It was a total fraud."

In this video clip, you'll see Dr Joe Sonnabend, co-founder of amfAR (The Foundation for AIDS Research) explain how the organization committed fraud by hyping up the risk of AIDS in order to get more money from Washington.

"One day one of the networks had received a press release from us, and the press release said that heterosexual AIDS is about to happen, that straight men are going to drop in droves... and I said that's B.S. where'd you get that from? It was a total fraud and scam. It was a fundraising ploy," says Dr Joe Sonnabend. "But it was so efficient that it resulted in a LIFE Magazine cover which said 'No one is safe from AIDS.' ...Once he put out this scare, the money started to flow. It really did."

Brent Leung, director of the House of Numbers film, then asks Dr Sonnabend, "Isn't that ethically wrong to scare an entire population?"

"What do you think?" answers Dr Sonnabend. "You live in this world you know that's exactly what they do."

Watch this too-hot-to-handle interview yourself in this exclusive YouTube clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfnY...

By the way, do you note the similarity between AIDS non-profit fundraising fraud and the Susan G. Komen for the Cure fundraising fraud we've exposed here on NaturalNews? (http://www.naturalnews.com/028670_K...) For both groups, it's always about the money, and the same thing is true with most other disease non-profit groups.

Also in this clip, you'll see journalist Mark Conlan describing how the Wall Street Journal exposed the fundraising fraud behind the AIDS industry.

Journalist Celia Farber also appears in this exclusive clip, saying, "It's a culture of P.R. A public relations phenomenon. The truth doesn't matter. What matters is the image. ...The reality is that AIDS is over."

AIDS, in other words, is no longer a threat to the world at large, and certainly not a threat to heterosexual men. But the AIDS front groups want to keep spreading fear in order to unlock more fundraising dollars that will pad their own pockets. So the fear mongering continues, the fraud continues and the truth gets swept under the rug.

What truth is that? That the "worldwide AIDS epidemic" is now largely a fictional construct created by the pharmaceutical industry, its non-profit front groups and the CDC to sell AIDS drugs that cause the very immunological suppression blamed on the disease. AIDS drugs, in other words, cause the symptoms of AIDS and thus they become a self-fulfilling prophecy to any person who dares take them.

Finally! Get the House of Numbers DVD for yourself

At long last, House of Numbers may be pre-ordered for its upcoming DVD release. You can reserve your copy of this remarkable, mind-blowing film right now by visiting www.HouseOfNumbers.com

This deluxe edition DVD also features hours of special features and behind-the-scenes footage. Shipped on three DVDs, this deluxe edition includes 24 featurettes covering:

HIV Testing
• HIV Testing 101
• The History and Evolution of HIV Testing
• The Morphing Fine Print of HIV Test Package Inserts
• The Changing Criteria of Western Blot Testing
• False Positives: Causes and Factors
• Deciphering Test Results for False Positives
• Examining the "Gold Standard" for HIV Diagnostic Tests
• HIV Testing in High Risk Versus Low Risk Populations
• HIV Testing Campaigns

A I D S
• The Bangui Definition - A Closer Look
• Bangui Redux: Abidjan and Caracas
• The Growing Family of AIDS Marker Diseases and Indicators
• The Clinicians' Dilemma: Dr. Anthony Fauci and Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine
• 1993 - CDC Adds the CD4 T-Cell Count Marker
• 1997 - CDC Tables 11 and 12: Addition by Subtraction

"Why I Began Questioning HIV" - Five Skeptic's Stories
• Dr. Kary Mullis
• Rian Malan
• Neville Hodgkinson
• Dr. Rodney Richards
• Dr. Christian Fiala

A Second Look
• Profile: Dr. Robert Gallo
• Profile: Dr. Peter Duesberg
• History of Fabricated Scares and The CDC
• The Incarnation Children's Center: A Cautionary Tale

Reserve your copy now at www.HouseOfNumbers.com

And be sure to check out today's exclusive video clip at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfnY...

Gwen Stefani Helps Promote HIV/AIDS Treatment in Africa

2010-05-01T00:38:00.001-05:00

By Darragh Worland | Friday, April 30, 2010 4:43 PM ET

All it takes is 40 cents a day to save life.

A whole host of celebrities, including rocker Gwen Stefani, are lending their names and faces in support of a campaign to raise money for HIV/AIDS treatment in Africa and to spread the word about an awareness-raising film by Spike Jonze.

The Lazarus Effect, a documentary film supported by the (RED) campaign, which collects funds from the sale of various products to help pay for HIV treatment in Africa, is set to premiere May 24 on HBO.

Directed by Lance Bangs and produced by Jonze and Susan Smith Ellis, The Lazarus Effect documents the amazing effects that antiretroviral drugs can have on those afflicted with AIDS. The film traces the experience of Constancde Mudenda, who lost all three of her children to AIDS before treatment was available. But when Mudenda learned of a clinic offering free ARVs, she became one of the first people to be enrolled. With her health restored, she now works as a educator at the clinic herself.

In support of the film and to promote the low cost of saving lives, friends of (RED) like actors Penelope Cruz, Orlando Bloom, Hugh Jackman, Don Cheadle, Stefani and U2 frontman Bono, have put together a video showing just what 40 cents can buy. Turns out, 40 cents can buy everything from gum to a costume mustache to a day's worth of life-saving ARVs. Even those close to death can be revived in as few as 40 days once they start taking the pills. This transformation is called The Lazarus Effect.
Check out the video here, and go to HBO online to learn more about the documentary.

Photo by PR Photos.

Watch House of Numbers to learn more about HIV and AIDS.

http://www.tonic.com/article/gwen-stefani-helps-promote-hiv-aids-treatment-in-africa/

Contrast the above article with the following:

The raw interview with Luc Montagnier - revealed!

To help provide clarity to this issue, NaturalNews spoke with House of Numbers filmmaker Brent Leung who agreed to provide us with exclusive, un-cut footage of the conversation with Luc Montagnier, complete with subtitles.

You can now view this exclusive, revealing footage on YouTube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQoN...

NaturalNews transcribed this un-cut conversation and below, we've reprinted the words exchanged between Brent Leung and Dr. Luc Montagnier. Here, you'll see that, in fact, Brent Leung did not quote Montagnier out of context, and that Montagnier makes his position crystal clear on points such as how nutrition may help reverse an AIDS infection.

What this transcript (and video) proves is that Leung's critics are, in fact, deeply misinformed in their accusations of Leung, and are guilty of printing false and defamatory information that accuses Leung of distorting the interviews used in his film. Read this transcript to see for yourself:

The transcript between Brent Leung and Dr. Luc Montagnier

Leung [the filmmaker]: You talked about oxidative stress earlier. Is treating oxidative stress one of the best ways to deal with the African AIDS epidemic?

Montagnier [the scientist]: I think this is one way to approach, to decrease the rate of transmission, because I believe HIV we can be exposed to HIV many times without bring chronically infected, our immune system will get rid of the virus within a few weeks, if you have a good immune system; and this is the problem also of the African people. Their nutrition is not very equilibrated, they are in oxidative stress, even if they are not infected with HIV; so their immune system doesn't work well already. So it's prone, it can, you know, allow HIV to get in and persist. So there are many ways which are not the vaccine, the magic name, the vaccine, many ways to decrease the transmission just by simple measures of nutrition, giving antioxidants -- proper antioxidants -- hygiene measures, fighting the other infections. So they are not spectacular, but they could, you know, decrease very well the epidemic, to the level they are in occidental countries, western countries.

Leung: So if you have a good immune system, then your body can naturally get rid of HIV?

Montagnier: Yes.

Leung: Oh, interesting. Do you think we should have more of a push for antioxidants, and things of that nature, in Africa than antiretrovirals (AIDS drugs)?

Montagnier: We should push for more, you know, a combination of measures; antioxidants, nutrition advice, nutritions, fighting other infections -- malaria, tuberculosis, parasitosis, worms -- education of course, genital hygiene for women and men also, very simple measures which [are] not very expensive, but which could do a lot. And this is my, actually my worry about the many spectacular action for the global funds to buy drugs and so on, and Bill Gates and so on, for the vaccine. But you know those kind of measures are not very well funded, they're not funded at all, or they are, you know, it really depends on the local government to take choice of this, but local governments they take advice of the scientific advisors from the intelligent institutions, and they don't get this kind of advice very often.

Leung: Well there's no money in nutrition, right? There's no profit.

Montagnier: There's no profit, yes. Water is important. Water is key.

Leung: Now one thing you said, you were talking about the fact that if you have a built immune system, it is possible to get rid of HIV naturally. If you take a poor African who's been infected and you build up their immune system, is it possible for them to also naturally get rid of it?

Montagnier: [Nodding yes] I would think so.

Leung: That's an important point.

Montagnier: It's important knowledge which is completely neglected. People always think of drugs and vaccine. So this is a message which may be different from what you heard before, no?

Leung: The closing?

Montagnier: No, no, yes, my message, it's different from what you heard from (Anthony) Fauci or...

Leung: Yes, it's a little different.

Montagnier: Little different.

Analysis of the conversation

As you can see from this transcript (and from watching the video), Leung asks no loaded questions and engages in no trickery whatsoever. If anything, Leung is quite reserved in his questioning, preferring to allow Montagnier to do most of the talking. In particular, Leung does not interrupt Montagnier, nor does he attempt to verbally entrap him in any way.

For his part, Dr. Montagnier doesn't mince words. He's very clear on the points he's making, saying them several times in different ways. His points are, essentially (paraphrased):

• You can be exposed to AIDS without getting infected.
• A strong immune system can protect you against AIDS.
• With the help of good nutrition, you can fight off AIDS.
• The importance of AIDS vaccines is exaggerated.
• AIDS can be approached with low-cost, highly-effective alternatives to vaccines.
• What the African people really need is better nutrition to protect themselves from AIDS.
• The facts about nutrition and AIDS are being neglected (by the medical establishment).

He's not wishy-washy about these things. He speaks with clear intent and does not waver on these points. At the end of the interview, before the cameras are turned off, he even acknowledges to Leung that what he just said was essentially a "bombshell" of information that stands at odds with conventional AIDS scientists such as Fauci.

Now, if you go back to the House of Numbers movie and watch the clips of Leung's conversation with Montagnier, you'll find that the quotes used in the film are right in line with what Montagnier is saying in his un-cut conversation. There is absolutely no distortion, no out-of-context quoting going on here. If anything, Leung has acted in a very professional way in choosing quotes for the final film that accurately reflect the essence of what Montagnier is communicating.

And for that, Leung gets blasted by critics and accused of misrepresenting what these scientists are saying. That's because the conventional AIDS-pharma proponents can't stand up to real-world scrutiny. Their AIDS mythologies are based on lies and disinformation, so instead of engaging in intelligent debate based on the available evidence, they simply attack any person who questions the tenants of their AIDS-pharma cult.

What the drug companies don't want you to know about AIDS

The drug companies don't want you to know the truth about AIDS... or cancer, or diabetes or heart disease. There's a simple truth that, if widely acknowledged, would absolutely devastate the pharmaceutical industry with all its heavily-promoted vaccines and patented chemicals. What simple truth is that?

AIDS has a cure. Cancer has a cure. Diabetes can be cured. Heart disease can be cured. The list goes on and on...

When the co-discoverer of the AIDS virus says, on camera, that essentially AIDS can be cured with nutrition, he is speaking a disallowed truth that the drug companies (and their minions) cannot tolerate. If people knew that AIDS could be halted -- or even reversed -- with nutrients such as antioxidants, they might not put so much faith in the billions of dollars worth of vaccines being pushed all around the world by not only Big Pharma, but even Bill and Melinda Gates, too (who have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the pockets of the drug companies to inject more children with vaccines).

This is why Brent Leung's film House of Numbers (www.HouseOfNumbers.com) is simultaneously so courageous and so relevant to modern health care. It's the first film to stand up and declare, "The AIDS Emperor wears no clothes!" This film, in fact, presents stunning evidence that, in many ways, exposes Big Pharma's AIDS vaccine scam. No wonder Leung is being so viciously attacked by the AIDS industry. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in the sick-care industry depend on more people being diagnosed with AIDS and treated with monopoly-priced drugs!

More un-cut footage coming your way

The AIDS industry's attacks against Brent Leung aren't over yet. Under pressure from proponents of the conventional AIDS industry, two more scientists interviewed for the film have now claimed their words were also taken out of context.

Through an exclusive arrangement with Brent Leung, NaturalNews plans to air full, un-cut footage of the interviews with these scientists, proving beyond any question that their words were in no way distorted by Leung. Watch for those exclusive clips in the days ahead...

Elton John Says Ryan White Turned His Life Around

2010-04-30T01:17:00.000-05:00

by The Associated Press
INDIANAPOLIS April 28, 2010, 10:35 pm ET

Elton John says he's been sober for 20 years, since shortly after the death of an Indiana teen with AIDS who the musician credits with inspiring him to turn his life around.

John was in Indianapolis on Wednesday to headline a benefit celebrating the life and legacy of Ryan White. The 18-year-old died on April 8, 1990, about five years after contracting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, through a tainted blood transfusion to treat his hemophilia.
The singer befriended the boy during his public battle for acceptance after he was banned from a central Indiana school at age 13, bringing national attention to HIV/AIDS education and the plight of children with HIV in the 1980s. John was at Riley Children's Hospital when White died and was a pallbearer and performed at the funeral.

"It was one of the greatest things in my life to meet Ryan's family, to be there the last week to try and help, and then for that wonderful message that he gave me to change my life around," John told The Associated Press before the Wednesday evening benefit. "It was weird to take stock and think of it — I'm 20 years sober this year, and it's 20 years since Ryan died, because I got sober shortly afterward."
Proceeds from the event, which was being hosted by Phil Donahue, will benefit the Elton John AIDS Foundation and the Indianapolis Children's Museum's "Power of Children" exhibit, which features White.

John established the foundation two years after White's death. The organization funds innovative HIV prevention and education programs, works to eliminate stigma and discrimination associated with HIV/AIDS, and provides direct care and support services for patients.

The 20-year anniversary of White's death is an opportunity to restart a dialogue about AIDS and push for educating children about the disease, John said.

"Every 10 years, a new generation of kids come up, and we see the numbers go up, because we can't really get to them in school," John said. "We never could. Education about sex and education about AIDS was totally forbidden. That could have saved so many more lives, because children are smart. Children will listen. You don't have to threaten children, you just have to inform them."
"It took a child to die to make people sit up and notice," he added.

White's mother, Jeanne White-Ginder, said John's return to Indianapolis was a bittersweet reminder of her son's last days.

White-Ginder said John played "secretary" during White's final days, filtering phone calls and telegrams and making sure those who sent flowers were acknowledged.

"One of the most beautiful scenes I think I can remember is walking into Ryan's room and seeing Elton standing on a chair decorating Ryan's room," White-Ginder said Wednesday. "He said, 'When he wakes up, I want him to know how much he was loved.' That really touched me as a mom because I hadn't thought to do that."

She said it was special to have John back to mark the 20th anniversary of her son's death.
"I've always felt like he was my guardian angel," she said.

John gives similar credit to White-Ginder, and to the family that helped him find purpose.
"Jeannie's incredible fortitude in going through this as a mother — I never saw her crack. The last week, there were some tense moments, and it was very emotional, but I never saw Ryan crack," John said. "It was just an amazing lesson in how to live life in the best possible way."

Blog Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126376203

House of Numbers Blog

Ban removed on foreigners with HIV/AIDS

2010-04-28T23:31:00.000-05:00

By Shan Juan (China Daily) Updated: 2010-04-29 07:43

A majority of Chinese people polled against the decision

Beijing - The international community has applauded the decision by the Chinese government to lift a two-decade-old travel ban on foreigners with HIV/AIDS, despite a recent survey showing a majority of the Chinese public does not support the decision.

The State Council said in an online statement late Tuesday that the government passed amendments on April 19, revising its border health quarantine law and the law on control of the entry and exit of aliens.

The move came days before the opening of the Shanghai Expo, which starts on Saturday and is expected to receive 4 million overseas visitors.

"I commend President Hu Jintao," said United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. "Punitive policies and practices only hamper the global AIDS response."

The UNAIDS Country Coordinator in China said on Wednesday the nation has displayed its global leadership credentials by lifting travel restrictions on people with HIV and AIDS.

"There are 51 countries in the world which still have such restrictions. China's move will have significant global influence and provide very important leadership," Mark Stirling, country coordinator of the UNAIDS China Office, was quoted as saying by Xinhua News Agency.

Foreigners will not have to claim their HIV status while seeking a Chinese visa, and selective HIV testing among foreigners entering China and the deportation of those found to be HIV positive will be abolished, said Hao Yang, deputy director of the Ministry of Health's disease prevention and control bureau.

Previously, those making honest claims about their status could be refused entry, as in the case of Australian writer Robert Dessaix, who was denied entry in March because he claimed HIV-positive status.

Meanwhile, about 84 percent of more than 4,000 respondents opposed lifting the ban, citing the possibility that infected foreigners would further spread the incurable disease in China, a poll conducted by China Daily and sohu.com in late March has found.

Li Dun, a law expert with Tsinghua University, said such restrictions are discriminatory and do not prevent HIV transmission or protect local public health, particularly when China has an HIV-positive population of 740,000, which some experts consider a low estimate.

Also, implementing such a ban in the face of globalization is almost impossible, he said.

With that in mind, in 1995 selective HIV testing for foreigners seeking to enter China replaced a mandatory test, according to the ministry.

But for stays longer than one year, foreigners were still required to test for HIV upon arrival in China regardless of their health claims during their visa application.

Ban Ki-moon urged the other 51 countries with AIDS restrictions to remove such measures as a matter of priority and urgency.

"Individuals should have equal access to freedom of movement - regardless of HIV status," said Michel Sidib, UNAIDS Executive Director.

"The change to the law is another example of China's leadership in the AIDS response," he noted.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-04/29/content_9788598.htm

See Dr. James Chin talk about HIV Estimates in the film, House of Numbers.

House of Numbers is coming to the Health Freedom Expo

2010-04-28T22:40:00.001-05:00

House of Numbers is coming to the Health Freedom Expo. Radio host Robert Scott Bell will be introducing the film and providing a forum for discussions.

About the lecturer:
Each week Robert Scott Bell empowers his listeners with healing principles that can aid in physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, economic and, yes, even political healing! Robert Scott Bell hosts the fastest three hours of healing information on national radio as he deals with everyday health issues from the perspective of alternative/holistic health care. Learn more at robertscottbell.blogspot.com or TalkRadioNetwork.com.

About the filmmaker: Canadian-born director Brent Leung attended Kwantlen University in British Columbia, majoring in psychology. In 1999 he moved to Nashville, Tennessee to attend The Watkins Film School. After three years of cinema study, Brent decided to devote his full attention to investigating the HIV/AIDS phenomenon, which had troubled him since his high school days. The result is his first feature, the documentary, House of Numbers.

Attend the Expo

Join Us For This Great Event!
The Health Freedom Expo returns to Chicago on June 4-6. This year features an outstanding line-up of many local, national and international speakers, dynamic workshops and seminars and it also showcases a diverse group of alternative and natural health care exhibitors.

What makes this Expo different is that it's supported by a not-for-profit lobbying group that works year round to protect consumers' rights, defends practitioners who use natural and nutritional solutions, and lobbies against laws which remove the individual's freedom to make informed health care choices.

Held at the beautiful Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel and Convention Center, the Chicago Health Freedom Expo is open to the public.

House of Numbers DVD Pre-orders Now Available -- Shipping July 20, 2010

2010-04-26T00:31:00.002-05:00

House of Numbers is 89 minutes long, but for every minute in the documentary there exists nearly four times as much footage that could not be included in the optimum time-frame for a feature-length film. Drawing on this resource, the special Deluxe Edition explores in greater depth and more exacting detail the issues raised in the Standard DVD. This previously unseen footage brings into sharper focus the controversies and the cast of characters comprising the HIV/AIDS narrative; making it compelling viewing for anyone engaged by this fascinating and fateful "anatomy of an epidemic."

The Standard DVD Pre-order price is $19.95 and will include English Closed Captions, Spanish and German subtitles, and Stereo and 5.1 surround sound. The special features will include the HON theatrical trailer along with promo material we have released on the internet, such as the Luc Montagnier's extended interview.

The Deluxe DVD Pre-Order price is $39.95. This includes the Standard DVD along with Two Additional DVDs with the following special features:

Behind-the-scenes Photos
Extended Interview Clips

23 Featurettes:

HIV Testing:

o HIV Testing 101

o The History and Evolution of HIV Testing

o The Morphing Fine Print of

HIV Test Package Inserts

o The Changing Criteria of Western Blot Testing

o Deciphering Test Results for False Positives

o Examining the “Gold Standard” for

HIV Diagnostic Tests

o HIV Testing in High Risk Versus

Low Risk Populations

o HIV Testing Campaigns

AIDS:

o The Bangui Definition - A Closer Look

o Bangui Redux: Abidjan and Caracas

o The Growing Family of AIDS Marker

Diseases and Indicators

o The Clinicians' Dilemma: Dr. Anthony Fauci and

Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine

o 1993 - CDC Adds the CD4 T-Cell Count Marker

o 1997 - CDC Tables 11 and 12

Addition by Subtraction

"Why I Began Questioning HIV" -

Five Skeptic's Stories

o Dr. Kary Mullis

o Rian Malan

o Neville Hodgkinson

o Dr. Rodney Richards

o Dr. Christian Fiala

A Second Look

o Profile: Dr. Robert Gallo

o Profile: Dr. Peter Duesberg

o History of Fabricated Scares and The CDC

o The Incarnation Children's Center:

A cautionary Tale

Pre-Order now available -- Shipping July 20, 2010

http://www.houseofnumbers.com/site/purchase-dvd

Currently we are offering NTSC, all region DVDs and will be providing PAL format shortly.

If you have any questions, please e-mail us at sales@houseofnumbers.com.

Berkeley scholar in dock over HIV-Aids article

2010-04-25T17:18:00.000-05:00

24 April 2010

By Zoë Corbyn

Anonymous complainants accuse Peter Duesberg of ‘ethical breach’ and making ‘false claims’. Zoë Corbyn reports

A scholar who has questioned the link between HIV and Aids is being investigated by his university following allegations of “unacceptable conduct”.

It has emerged that the University of California, Berkeley launched an investigation last November into whether Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology who is well known for denying the link between HIV and Aids, had violated its policies when submitting an article on the theme to the journal Medical Hypotheses.

The article, “HIV-Aids hypothesis out of touch with South African Aids – A new perspective”, argues that there is “as yet no proof that HIV causes Aids” and says the claim that the virus has killed millions is “unconfirmed”.

Its publication last July led to a furore, and prompted the publisher of the unorthodox journal, Elsevier, to issue an ultimatum to its editor, Bruce Charlton. It demanded that a peer-review system be introduced to replace the journal’s current model, under which Professor Charlton decides which papers to publish on the strength of how interesting or radical they are.

Professor Charlton has refused to implement the changes and faces the sack as a result.
Elsevier withdrew the Duesberg paper to submit it to a peer-review test, which resulted in its being “permanently withdrawn” last month.

In a letter to Professor Duesberg, dated 18 November 2009 and seen by Times Higher Education, Berkeley says it had received allegations that submitting the paper amounted to “unacceptable conduct”.

“The specific allegations are that an article you submitted to Medical Hypotheses was investigated and then withdrawn by the publisher based on issues of credibility and false claims [and] that you failed to declare a relevant conflict of interest with regard to the commercial interests of your authors,” it says.
Two anonymous letters of complaint accompany Berkeley’s letter.

One alleges that a co-author of the paper, David Rasnick – who also denies the HIV-Aids link – had “until recently” worked as a researcher for the Dr Rath Health Foundation Africa. It alleges that the foundation “promoted and distributed micronutrient products as alternatives to the use of antiretroviral drugs”.

It continues: “[The affiliation] is a material and relevant fact that should have been disclosed in the paper by Duesberg et al. As the responsibility for making such a disclosure is the corresponding author’s, it appears…that Professor Duesberg has likely committed an ethical breach that should be investigated.”

The second letter accuses Professor Duesberg of damaging the credibility of Berkeley and science by making “false claims”.

“If the University of California is to maintain its reputation as one of the most outstanding academic institutions in the world, it cannot support the use of the university or an academic position as platforms to disseminate dangerous opinions and deny principles which are the very foundations of science,” it says.

Professor Duesberg acknowledged that Dr Rasnick had worked for the South African organisation from 2005 to 2006, but stressed it was non-profit and that Dr Rasnick’s employment had ended three years prior to the submission of the Medical Hypotheses manuscript.

He noted that the faculty investigative officer appointed to examine the allegations – Art Reingold, division head of public health biology and epidemiology at Berkeley’s School of Public Health – had received grant money to study HIV-Aids. He also criticised the university for “hiding” the identities of the complainants.

“The HIV-Aids establishment has censored our paper because it undermines the primary prediction of the HIV-Aids hypothesis,” he said.

“I am under investigation for scientific misconduct at a university that is the cradle of free speech because I have published a paper that proposes an alternative.”

On the allegation that he had brought Berkeley and science into disrepute, the academic said it was “odd” that the university was only now responding to such charges, “23 years after I first advanced arguments that HIV is not compatible with the epidemiology and biology of viral disease”.

If Professor Duesberg is found guilty of misconduct, the university could impose a sanction ranging from a warning letter to demotion or even dismissal. Professor Duesberg said he expected the outcome of the investigation to be known in the next few weeks.

Berkeley did not respond to THE’s request for comment.
zoe.corbyn@tsleducation.com

For more information on Peter Duesberg and other scientists involved in the AIDS debate, watch House of Numbers.

Romania runs out of Aids drugs

2010-04-23T19:18:00.000-05:00

The lives of people with HIV in Romania are being put at risk as the country runs out of drugs to keep them alive, say NGOs, while the government appears to blame the recession.

Activists have been afraid it would happen in the poorest countries of Asia or Africa. But it's happening in Europe instead. In Romania, HIV drugs are running out. People in the regions have been traveling to Bucharest to try to get their supplies, but the capital city's shelves are emptying and from this week, they will be turned away. As the Romanian Aids organisations put it, people with HIV are being sentenced to death.

Some people have had no drugs for over a month now. The reasons for the stock-outs are not entirely clear. Certainly Romania is hit by the recession, but, as an open letter from the EU HIV/Aids Civil Society Forum to the Romanian president, Traian Basescu, and his government said yesterday, other cash-hit European states have managed to keep the medicines available. It is a very serious situation for the 7,000 or so people with HIV in Romania. Antiretroviral drugs keep people alive and well, but those who start the drugs have to stay on the drugs, or the virus in their body will evolve into a drug-resistant strain. And then the drugs they were taking will not work any more. They will need other (more expensive) drugs instead. And for some, the Forum told the government in its letter, time is running out.

In particular those who as youngsters got infected in Romanian hospitals during their early childhood, between 1986 and 1992, are patients who received several drug regimens in the past, and some of them are already receiving their last treatment option. By interrupting their treatment, these people will be at great personal health risk, with the well-known public health implications on top.

The Forum - and the local NGOs - are urging the Romanian government to take steps to restore the drug supply. Money may be short, they say, but it is open to them to negotiate lower prices with the pharmaceutical industry, which they have not done. The letter also asks the government to call in the World Health Organisation for help and advice.

Depriving people of the drugs that will keep them alive is a clear breach, they say, of article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

Two Romanian HIV/Aids NGOs, SENS POZITIV Association and ARAS - the Romanian Association Against AIDS, have set up a petition, here.

Posted by Sarah Boseley 18.14 BST

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/sarah-boseley-global-health/2010/apr/23/hiv-infection-aids

______________________________________________

Watch House of Numbers and see the Nagel Family talk about adopting their daughter from Romania, her HIV positive test, and the direction they chose to take regarding HIV treatment.

HIV/AIDS - Drug Pipeline Analysis and Market Forecasts to 2016

2010-04-23T13:22:00.000-05:00

Published: Apr-2010 Report Code: GDHCPRT086

Report Format: Electronic PDF

GlobalData's report, “HIV/AIDS – Drug Pipeline Analysis and Market Forecasts to 2016” is an essential source of information and analysis on the global HIV/AIDS market. The report identifies the key trends shaping and driving the global HIV/AIDS market. The report also provides insight on the prevalent competitive landscape and the emerging players expected to bring significant shift in the market positioning of the existing market leaders. Most importantly, the report provides valuable insight on the pipeline products within the global HIV/AIDS sector. GlobalData estimated the HIV/AIDS market was worth $12 billion in 2009. The global Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infection market will continue to grow between 2009 and 2016 at a slower rate due to a series of patent expiries during this period. The growth rate is likely to decline from 2012 onwards due to the impact of the patent expiry of key drugs. The market is characterized by a high unmet need of drugs which can cure the disease. Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) which requires patients to take different classes of drugs has however succeeded in achieving near zero levels of HIV in infected people. Increased uptake of HAART and increasing awareness (which leads to increased treatment seeking) will drive the market. The pipeline for HIV is strong and consists of more than 250 molecules currently in development for various disease segments.

Scope

The scope of the report includes:
Annualized global HIV/AIDS market revenues data from 2001 to 2009, forecast for seven years to 2016.
Geographies covered in this report are the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), Italy, Spain, Germany, France and Japan.
Pipeline analysis data providing a split across phases by mechanism of action, and the emerging trends. The key classes of mechanism of action include HIV vaccines, Nonnucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors (NNRTIs), Protease Inhibitors (PIs), Multi-class Combination Products, Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors (NRTIs), CCR5 receptor antagonists, HIV integrase inhibitors, Nucleoside analogues, Viral entry inhibitors, Maturation inhibitors and Fusion Inhibitors.
Analysis of the current and future market competition in the global HIV/AIDS market. The key market players covered Boehring Ingelheim, Achillion Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline, Incyte and Pharmasset, Shire Pharmaceuticals and Tibotec Virco
Insightful review of the key industry drivers, restraints and challenges. Each trend is independently researched to provide qualitative analysis of its implications.
The key topics covered include a strategic competitor assessment, market characterization, unmet needs and implications for the future HIV/AIDS market.

Reasons to Buy

The report will enhance your decision making capability in a more rapid and time sensitive manner. It will allow you to:
Develop and design your in-licensing and out-licensing strategies through review of pipeline products and technologies and by identifying companies with the most robust pipeline.
Develop business strategies by understanding the trends shaping and driving the global HIV/AIDS market.
Drive revenues by understanding key trends, innovative products and technologies, market segments and companies likely to impact the global HIV/AIDS market in future.
Formulate effective sales and marketing strategies by understanding the competitive landscape and by analyzing the performance of various competitors.
Identify emerging players with potentially strong product portfolio and create effective counter-strategies to gain competitive advantage.
Organize your sales and marketing efforts by identifying the market categories and segments that present maximum opportunities for consolidations, investments and strategic partnerships.
What’s the next big thing in the global HIV/AIDS market landscape? – Identify, understand and capitalize.

Watch House of Numbers to see more on HIV Drugs.

Annie Lennox Advocating HIV/AIDS Treatment and Prevention

2010-04-22T12:56:00.000-05:00

Submitted by Amit Pathania on Thu, 04/22/2010 - 09:36 - TOPNEWS
http://topnews.us/content/217653-annie-lennox-advocating-hivaids-treatment-and-prevention

In her recent American Idol related appearance, where Annie Lennox's performance could be watched live via satellite, she wore a 'HIV Positive' black t-shirt which surprised her fans. People has started speculating that whether Annie have AIDS.

She has been advocating HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention since long. Lennox introduced a four year old little girl with HIV and pneumonia during her Idol Gives Back appearance. The girl’s mother had died from AIDS, leaving her an orphan. She urged the people to support the helpless and vulnerable.
Annie along with the SING Campaign will be supporting the Love Is All We Need Dinner and Auction on World AIDS Orphans Day which falls on 7th May 2010.

The campaign was started by Lennox after she heard that Nelson Mandela has described the African HIV pandemic as ‘genocide’, which is targeting mainly women and children. About 2 million dollars have already been raised and will talk about her ongoing battle against the HIV/AIDS epidemic at the dinner. She will also narrate her experiences in South Africa.

Annie said, “Access to treatment is a basic human rights issue. People do not have to die from AIDS”.

Blogger Review of House of Numbers

2010-04-21T11:42:00.000-05:00

Movie Review:

As someone who has followed the scientific debates regarding the cause of AIDS since the early 1990’s, I have reported on many of the controversies and inconsistencies with the existing causation hypotheses. Yes, that is right, there are multiple perspectives as to what causes the syndrome labeled as AIDS, even from within the well funded scientific orthodoxy. This, the film reveals.

Young filmmaker Brent Leung has done a remarkable job of allowing the scientists on all sides of this debate to describe their viewpoints in their own words so that the viewer can decide for himself the credibility or lack thereof of the information presented. How refreshing it is for a documentary film to treat its audience as if it is intelligent and capable of drawing reasonable conclusions, rather than being preached at as if we are all little children.

The calls for censorship of this film are outrageous. Beware those with conflicts of interest who appear offended for the mere suggestion that “they should wash their hands after cutting on cadavers before going into the next room to deliver babies.” Have we learned nothing since the time of Ignaz Semmelweis, much less Galileo?

House of Numbers is an important film at a time where we are rapidly running out of resources to chase a disease that may not actually be a disease at all. Yes, billions of dollars of potentially misallocated research funds are at stake, but so are the lives of potentially millions of immunocompromised inhabitants of planet earth.

If it is possible that conflicts of interest have covered up and prevented other avenues of research into immune dysfunction be explored, wouldn’t you want to know it?

Watch online Movie Trailer free House of Numbers English Hollywood Film.The film Directed by Brent Leung.

In my opinion, a good documentary film reveals many facets of its subject matter in ways that elevate interest throughout. A great documentary film allows its audience to draw its own conclusions. I sat riveted by House of Numbers. Three times. Dare I be so bold to posit that this may be the film to ignite a renaissance of scientific freedom and inquiry devoid of politics and economics?

http://koreanactor.isay.co.za/2010/04/21/online-watch-house-of-numbers-english-movie-trailer-review-cast/

Gilead cuts 2010 sales outlook, shares fall

2010-04-20T22:57:00.000-05:00

(Reuters) - Gilead Sciences Inc (GILD.O) posted disappointing quarterly sales for its core HIV drugs and cut its full-year forecast due to U.S. healthcare reform, sending its shares down more than 3 percent after-hours.

First-quarter sales of AIDS drug Truvada rose 11 percent to $657.8 million, while sales of Atripla, which combines Truvada with Bristol-Myers Squibb Co's (BMY.N) Sustiva into a single pill, rose 36 percent to $692.9 million.

However, analysts had expected even higher Truvada sales of $680 million and Atripla sales of $726 million, according to RBC Capital Markets.

The results followed news late on Monday that Gilead had terminated study of an experimental drug for hepatitis C because the drug was causing too much toxicity.

"Their hepatitis C program doesn't look like it's competitive and now you've got a little softness in their HIV revenue," Sanford Bernstein analyst Geoffrey Porges said, adding that investors may be "heading toward the end of their patience."

The company also lowered its outlook for 2010 sales by about $200 million to a range of $7.4 billion to $7.5 billion, citing the impact of recently passed healthcare reform. The new legislation calls on drugmakers to offer higher price rebates for government-funded health plans.

The biotech company posted a first-quarter net profit of $854.9 million, or 92 cents per share, compared with $589.1 million or 63 cents per share a year earlier.

Adjusting for acquisition expenses, restructuring costs and stock-based compensation, the company said it earned 99 cents a share for the quarter. Analysts had expected 96 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Quarterly revenue rose 36 percent to $2.09 billion, while product sales rose 24 percent to $1.79 billion. Analysts had expected revenue of $2.07 billion.

Chief Financial Officer Robin Washington said on a conference call that international government pricing pressures and currency exchange rates could also affect sales.

"During the first quarter we have seen increased evidence of additional international government measures to reduce pharmaceutical expenditures including increased rebates, cancellations, and callbacks of price increases," she said.

Gilead said product sales for the quarter were reduced by $29.4 million due to the impact of U.S. healthcare reform legislation.

Royalty, contract and other revenue more than tripled to $297.8 million from $82.9 million. Gilead derives most of its royalty revenue from Roche Holding AG's (ROG.VX) sales of Tamiflu, which has seen strong demand because of the swine flu pandemic.

J&J said its experimental AIDS drug, known as TMC278, was found to be at least as effective as Bristol-Myers' Sustiva in tests the company plans to submit for regulatory approval in the third quarter. J&J is working with Gilead on a single pill that would combine TMC278 with Truvada.
The company said it expects to file for regulatory approval of the new fixed-dose regimen later this year.

Gilead shares, which closed at $45.07 on the Nasdaq, fell to $43.60 in after-hours trading.

(Additional reporting by Bill Berkrot; Editing by Andre Grenon, Richard Chang and Matthew Lewis)

House of Numbers CGI to screen at the Melbourne Int'l Animation Festival

2010-04-19T16:35:00.000-05:00

The computer graphics created for House of Numbers has been invited to screen in the 10th annual Melbourne International Animation Festival.

CGI artist Scott Meador and graphics supervisor Jim Lockhart took us inside the body, creating moving imagery of the HIV replication cycle hypothesis. Click here to see a video simultaneously comparing the basic grey 3D model concept, the 3D render, and the final composite.

Information about the Melbourne Int'l Animation Festival:

Get ready to strap yourselves in for a nine day blast of animation from around the world in the 10th edition of the Melbourne International Animation Festival! This will be your only opportunity in Australia to see such a comprehensive line-up of current animated short films in competition and specially curated programs, that highlight recent productions and absolute gems from the archive. MIAF aims to challenge and inspire audiences with thematic, visual and technical diversity from award winners, outstanding industry veterans and those wonderful newcomers who are exploring their talent on screen for the very first time.

In 2010 MIAF celebrates our 10th anniversary! Woohoo! As well as the regular avalanche of animated goodness covering the best recently released and historical animation, we have three special highlight programs:

10 Years of International Highlights
10 Years of Australian Highlights
10 Years of Late Night Bizarre

We’ve received more than 12,000 entries, screened more than 2,500 films and had some of the most talented animators in the world come and hang with us! These programs will review some of the hits, misses and should-a-beens!!

Expectant HIV/Aids women to start on ARV earlier - WHO

2010-04-18T16:42:00.000-05:00

By Halima Abdallah
Posted Monday, April 19 2010 at 00:00

HIV-positive pregnant women will now start on antiretroviral in the 14th week of their pregnancy, according to World Health Organisation’s revised guideline on prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV.

The revised guidelines, based on those of 2006, recommend that all HIV-positive pregnant women be given ARVs starting at 14 weeks and continuing through the end of the breastfeeding, to reduce the risk of HIV transmission and improve the infant’s chance of survival. An earlier start to antiretroviral treatment boosts the immune system and reduces the risks of HIV-related diseases and deaths.

The 2006 guidelines recommended antiretroviral therapy (ART) in the third trimester (beginning at 28 weeks). At the time, there was insufficient evidence on the protective effect of ARVs during breastfeeding. However since then, studies and trials have demonstrated that starting ARV earlier reduces rates of death and disease and increases the efficacy of ARVs in preventing transmission to the infant while breastfeeding.

The latest guideline issued in November 2009, recommends that mothers should continue breastfeeding even when they are positive as they take the drugs with their babies.

“We did a study in National Referral Hospital Mulago and found that the risks of death were higher in those children who were not breastfed because they were prone to diseases like diarrhoea,” Ministry of Health Principal Medical Officer in charge of Child Health Jessica Sabiti said.

The guidelines also recommend that once a mother has selected breastfeeding or providing formula milk, she should do so exclusively and not mix the two. She can choose to boil the breast milk up to 60 degrees, before feeding it to the baby.

“Mixing breast milk and other formula milk enhances transmission because formula feeds causes perforation in the baby’s digestive system when given too early. When the baby is breastfed, the mother’s milk that contains the virus infiltrates the baby’s body through the perforations,” Jessica said.

United States pledges $2.7 billion for Kenya HIV battle

2010-04-17T21:34:00.000-05:00

By Jeremy Clarke, Reuters

A health worker at the Kenyatta International Centre on December 1, 2009 during celebrations for World AIDS Day in Nairobi, Kenya. The United States has committed $2.7 billion to help fight HIV infection in Kenya where more than a million people are living with the disease.

Photograph by: Simon Maina, AFP/Getty Images

NAIROBI – The United States committed $2.7 billion on Wednesday to help fight HIV infection in Kenya where more than a million people are living with the disease.

The pledge is part of the largest U.S. foreign aid program devoted to a single disease -- the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief -- and has been lauded as a bright spot of former President George W. Bush's tenure.

The money, which is to be dispersed over the next five years, represents a 112 percent increase in funding for the program in Kenya, east Africa's largest economy. It is seen by the United States as an enhancement of a successful program.

"Kenya is now the biggest recipient of this program in the world, more than South Africa," U.S. Ambassador Michael Ranneberger told reporters in Nairobi.

He said the agreement with Nairobi meant the government was expected to increase direct budget support for the fight against HIV/AIDS by a minimum of 10 percent annually.

Kenyan Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta said the effect of the HIV virus and AIDS on the Kenyan economy was great.

"Studies done assessing the effect of HIV/AIDS on economic growth in Africa show that we lose about 2 percentage points in terms of growth. This is due to the negative impact of HIV/AIDS impact on productivity of labor," he said.

The program will include caring for more than 550,000 orphans and vulnerable children, as well as helping manage other related co-infections such as Tuberculosis, Kenyatta said.

Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 72 percent of the world's AIDS-related deaths with 1.4 million last year, while an estimated 1.9 million people in the region were newly infected with HIV.
In Kenya, AIDS-related deaths have fallen by 29 percent since 2002.

Groups Protest Segregation of Inmates With H.I.V.

2010-04-15T01:17:00.000-05:00

Published: April 14, 2010 - NY Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

In Alabama, prisoners infected with H.I.V. must wear white armbands and live in special units. In South Carolina, infected men have blue dots on their badges and are housed in a maximum-security prison; female prisoners carry the name of the H.I.V./AIDS dorm on their uniforms. The two states are the last to segregate and put blanket restrictions on H.I.V.-positive inmates and on Wednesday, rights groups called for change, saying the policies violate federal and international guidelines. Infected prisoners’ chances of early release and help in re-entering society are harmed as well, according to a report issued by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch. South Carolina bars them from participating in work-release, for example, and Alabama limits such opportunities. Prison officials in the two states say that segregation is necessary to prevent the spread of H.I.V. and provide specialized medical care.

A version of this brief appeared in print on April 15, 2010, on page A18 of the New York edition.

H&M launches third Fashion Against AIDS! campaign

2010-04-14T23:31:00.000-05:00

Inspired by the summer festival season, H&M is launching it's third Fashion Against AIDS! campaign with a collection of rock and roll summer styles, with 25% of the proceeds going to youth HIV/AIDS awareness projects.

"It is very important to make people aware of the problem with AIDS and HIV and we want to contribute in the fight against the disease by donating some of the sales from this collection,” says Ann-Sofie Johansson, H&M’s head of design, in a press release.

Described as "a mix of rock with bohemia and glamour with added ethnic touches," the girls collection consists of ready-for-summer denim hotpants, patterned leggings, embellished tunic tops, maxi-dresses, leather jackets, gladiator shoes, chunky bracelets, wide belts , and beaded necklaces.

And for guys who want to look like they're in the band, the boy's collection offers slim blazers and jackets, faded and patched denim jeans and cropped shorts, embellished waistcoats, paisley vests and the "essential rocker’s hat."

Of course if your headed out to a summer music festival, your going to need supplies for camping out. For this reason the collection offers rocker-chic tents, sleeping bags and folding chairs, along with guys and gals themed toiletry kits.

Born to rock but sticking close to home this summer? The collection offers a quartet of headphones in vibrant patterns and colors so you can rock out even if your not at a hot concert.

Hitting stores May 20th and priced from just $2.95 to $79.95, the Fashion Against Aids! collection allows you to give back at a bargain price.

City Endorses New Policy for Treatment of H.I.V.

2010-04-14T16:07:00.000-05:00

Published: April 2, 2010 - By SABIN RUSSELL - NY Times

In a major shift of H.I.V. treatment policy, San Francisco public health doctors have begun to advise patients to start taking antiviral medicines as soon as they are found to be infected, rather than waiting — sometimes years — for signs that their immune systems have started to fail.

The new, controversial city guidelines, to be announced next week by the Department of Public Health, may be the most forceful anywhere in their endorsement of early treatment against H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

Ever since combinations of antiviral drugs were found to slow progression of the disease in the mid-1990s, doctors and patients have wrestled with the question of when to begin a lifetime regimen of costly and sometimes toxic medicines. The answer remains in dispute, but public health leaders here are now making a case for a change.

Behind the policy switch is mounting evidence that patients who start early are more likely to live longer, and less likely to suffer a variety of ailments — including heart disease, kidney failure and cancer — that plague long-term survivors. Studies suggest that in the early years of infection, when a patient may show few signs of immune system failure, the virus is in fact causing permanent damage that becomes evident later.

For instance, in older patients who finally start taking the drugs, the effects of chronic inflammation take their toll.

“The impact on health risk is comparable to that of diabetes,” said Dr. Steven G. Deeks, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. “Their immune system may look like that of someone 30 years older.”

Dr. Diane V. Havlir, chief of the H.I.V./AIDS division at San Francisco General Hospital, said the new policy was already in effect for her patients. Although a decision whether or not to take the medicine rests with the patient, all those testing positive for H.I.V. will be offered combination therapy, with advice to pursue it.
“The history of H.I.V. disease has always been about change,” she said. “We pride ourselves on working quickly with new data.”

At the public hospital’s H.I.V. clinic, a 30-year-old man is mulling advice from Dr. C. Bradley Hare to start on antiviral drugs. He was infected four years ago, but his T-cell count, a measure of infection-fighting white blood cells, is 735, comparable to that of an uninfected, healthy adult. He is buff and athletic and feels good.

The man has decided to keep waiting. “Once you start the drugs, you can’t stop,” he said. “You know how they say, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?’ ”

Dr. Hare has been following research on early treatment, and for the last several years he has asked his patients to think about it. Now, he is recommending it outright. He said most of his patients did not have serious problems with drug side effects. “A lot of times they have a sense of relief when they start the meds,” he said.

The turning point in San Francisco’s thinking may have been a study in The New England Journal of Medicine on April 1, 2009, that compared death rates among thousands of North American H.I.V. patients. Dr. Mari Kitahata, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, and her team of researchers found that patients who put off therapy until their immune system showed signs of damage had a nearly twofold greater risk of dying — from any cause — than those who started treatment when their T-cell counts were above 500.

There is another motivation prompting the change. Reducing the level of virus in the population of infected people may reduce the spread of the disease.

“I do anticipate it will drive down the rates of new infections,” Dr. Mitchell H. Katz, San Francisco director of public health, said. “It’s a nice, secondary benefit of this new policy.”

Dr. Katz said that despite cuts in health budgets, a policy to add to the number of H.I.V. patients taking expensive drugs made economic sense. “H.I.V. medications have been continually proven to be cost effective,” he said, “and in this case, it is also the right thing to do.”

The program is being carried out without a clear picture of its cost to city and state health agencies. Antiviral drugs can cost $12,000 a year, consuming $350 million of the budget of California AIDS Drug Assistance Plan.

Dr. Michelle Roland, chief of the state’s Office of AIDS, said she and her counterparts across the country were working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to estimate the added cost of early treatment.

In San Francisco, up to 2,000 people know they are H.I.V. positive, have healthy T-cell counts and are not yet on treatment, according to the city. Cost estimates are complicated by unknowns, like the number of patients choosing to participate, how close they were to needing treatment under the previous system and whether they had private insurance.

When the first combinations of AIDS drugs came out in 1996, the thinking was “hit early, and hit hard.” But as patients battled nasty side effects, like diarrhea and disfiguring shifts in body fat, therapy was deferred until T-cell counts fell as low as 200.

Today, with safer drugs, quick viral suppression is back in fashion.

“The field is moving, inexorably, to earlier and earlier therapy,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He called San Francisco’s decision “an important step in that direction.”
But the proposal is highly controversial, even in San Francisco. “It’s just too risky,” said Dr. Jay Levy, the U.C.S.F. virologist who was among the first to identify the cause of AIDS. The new drugs may be less toxic, Dr. Levy said, but no one knows the effects of taking them for decades.

San Francisco’s decision follows a split vote in December by a 38-member federal panel on treatment guidelines. Only half of the H.I.V. experts gathered by the Department of Health and Human Services favored starting drugs in patients with healthy levels of more than 500 T-cells.

One panel member, James D. Neaton of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, contends that a rigorous, randomized clinical trial is needed to show whether early intervention works. The risks of early treatment — giving powerful drugs to people at low risk of disease — - could outweigh the “modest predicted benefit,” Dr. Neaton wrote in an e-mail message. “That is why we do randomized trials.”

In 2009, the University of Minnesota began a study to find that proof. Results are expected in 2015.
Dr. Lisa C. Capaldini, who runs an AIDS practice in the Castro district, also has strong reservations. “H.I.V. behaves differently in different people,” she said.

Although Dr. Capaldini recognizes that today’s drugs are a vast improvement over earlier therapies, the program, she said “is not ready for prime time.”

But the changes make sense to Dr. Stephen Follansbee, director of H.I.V. Services for Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco, who oversees a program that covers 2,100 people with the virus.
“The idea of living in happy symbiosis with this virus is delusional,” Dr. Follansbee said. “If you have a fire in one part of the house, but not in the living room, you don’t wait for it to reach the living room before you call the fire department.”

A version of this article appeared in print on April 4, 2010, on page A25A of the National edition.

Miami man admits guilt in $60 mln healthcare scam

2010-04-13T20:25:00.000-05:00

* Scheme involved recruits from Cuban immigrant community

* Suspect spent nearly $3 million on luxury cars alone

MIAMI, April 13 (Reuters) - A Miami man has pleaded guilty to a Medicare fraud scheme that sought to cheat the U.S. healthcare system out of more $60 million, authorities said on Tuesday.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida said Ihosvany Marquez confessed to overseeing a criminal operation that submitted at least $61 million in false claims to Medicare for the treatment of patients with HIV, AIDS, cancer and a variety of other ailments at eight Miami and Orlando-area health clinics.

Medicare, the federal health insurer for more than 43 million elderly and disabled Americans, paid nearly $24 million of the bogus claims.

The returns were so good that Marquez -- a former high school pitching ace who went on to have a short-lived career in minor league baseball -- spent millions of dollars on jewelry, watches, luxury cars and race horses, according to court records.

As part of his plea agreement, he admitted to laundering the healthcare fraud proceeds through a Miami-area car dealership and through two Miami check cashing stores, Pelly Box Lunch and La Bamba Check Cashing, authorities said.

He and an unidentified number of co-conspirators, all of whom were indicted separately, concealed their involvement in the scheme by recruiting nominee or "straw" owners for each healthcare clinic they operated, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

It said the nominal owners, mostly from the closely knit Cuban immigrant community, were paid large sums of cash to sign corporate and bank records and other documents before fleeing the country to avoid arrest.

Florida, where healthcare fraud has replaced the drug trade as the crime of choice among many felons, has long been has long been known as the capital of Medicare fraud.

The cases often involve multimillion-dollar schemes featuring bogus suppliers of durable medical equipment such as wheelchairs and sham infusion therapies for the treatment of HIV and AIDS. (Reporting by Tom Brown; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Lady Gaga Says She's Celibate And Fans Should Be Too 'I can't believe I'm saying this — don't have sex,' singer says.

2010-04-13T00:07:00.000-05:00

Forget that ride on the disco stick ... at least for now. That's the message Lady Gaga is sending to her fans, telling them that they should follow her example and live a celibate lifestyle.

The 24-year-old singer who's made a career with songs that glorify carnal pleasures told London's that she is currently under a self-imposed sex ban and that others should consider a similar posture. "I can't believe I'm saying this — don't have sex. I'm single right now and I've chosen to be single because I don't have the time to get to know anybody," she said while visiting England to help promote MAC's Viva Glam campaign, which supports global HIV and AIDS projects. "So it's OK not to have sex, it's OK to get to know people. I'm celibate, celibacy's fine."

Gaga said her celibacy is something she wants to "celebrate" with her fans, extending her oft-repeated message to her "little monsters" that they should be secure in their own skin and not shy away from being different.

"It's OK to be whomever it is that you want to be," she said. "You don't have to have sex to feel good about yourself, and if you're not ready, don't do it. And if you are ready, there are free condoms given away at my concerts when you're leaving! ... I remember the cool girls when I was growing up. Everyone started to have sex. But it's not really cool anymore to have sex all the time. It's cooler to be strong and independent."

Part of the reason Gaga said she was sending the celibacy message was because of the steady rise in the rate of HIV infection among women worldwide, which has grown while the overall rate among men has continued to decline.

"The rate of infection worldwide is higher than ever for women in our particular demographic," said the singer, referring to women aged 17-24 and 38-56, the bracket of her partner in the campaign, 56-year-old '80s pop star Cyndi Lauper. "Part of the problem is that women in those groups are not getting tested. ... This is a disease that affects everyone, not just the gay community, and right now it's mostly affecting women."

Gaga realizes that her fans idolize her, as evidenced by the legion who arrive for her concerts dressed in Gaga drag and who post countless homages to her high-concept videos online. "When you're in the public eye, you're a role model whether you want to be or not. And I want to be," she said. "I'm not one of those self-obsessed artists who don't care about their fans. It's not just about the music."

House of Numbers: The seventeenth annual Cinema Against AIDS, held during the Cannes Film Festival, is a black-tie event

2010-04-12T19:52:00.000-05:00

Over the years, Cinema Against AIDS has become the most eagerly anticipated and best-publicized party held during the Cannes Film Festival. Cinema Against AIDS events are always marked by unforgettable moments: from Sharon Stone dancing along to an impromptu performance by Sir Elton John and Ringo Starr, to George Clooney bestowing a kiss on a lucky auction bidder. The event consistently has the most exciting and diverse guest list of any party held during the festival. It includes many of the celebrities and personalities associated with the film festival, while also attracting familiar faces from the worlds of fashion, music, business, and international society. Since 1993, Cinema Against AIDS events around the world have raised more than $50 million for lifesaving AIDS research.

SPONSORSHIP

Co-Sponsor Package—$150,000

TABLES
Grand Benefactor Package—$60,000
Benefactor Package—$40,000

TICKETS
Benefactor “Pair”—$30,000
Patron Ticket—$6,000
Supporter Ticket—$4,000*

DATE
Thursday, May 20, 2010

LOCATION
Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc
Cap d’Antibes, France

AIDS ‘Next Big Thing’: Gilead Pill to Prevent Spread

2010-04-08T23:10:00.000-05:00

April 1 (Bloomberg) -- Gilead Sciences Inc. may learn this year whether its drugs for treating HIV can also stop people from catching the virus in the first place.
The approach may help curb the AIDS pandemic in poor countries and bring Gilead $1 billion a year in additional U.S. sales, said Josh Schimmer, an analyst at Leerink Swann & Co. in Boston. Most investors aren’t alert to the potential benefit, he said. Researchers are compiling the first data from 10 trials involving more than 20,000 people, and initial results may be available in July.

“This could be very meaningful for Gilead,” Schimmer said in a telephone interview. “You’re potentially treating 50 patients to prevent one. Commercially that’s very attractive. I don’t hear anybody talking about this, and I think all of us should be more aware.”

If the strategy works, the pills from Foster City, California-based Gilead may promise the world a powerful tool for fighting AIDS, the deadliest infectious disease, after scientists’ failure so far to develop an effective vaccine or virus-killing gel.

Skeptics say the approach, called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, may be too costly and impractical in sub-Saharan Africa, where 22 million people are infected with HIV -- putting millions of others at risk -- and per-capita income is $951 a year.

Side effects may also undermine the plan. While doctors regard Gilead’s drugs as relatively safe, nobody knows what the medicines do in people who are taking them for a disease they don’t have, or how eager these patients will be to put up with the diarrhea, dizziness and depression the pills may cause.

‘High Tolerance’

“People have a high tolerance for side effects if it’s saving their life,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of the New York-based AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group. “It may be harder for healthy people to accept the side effects that come with prevention.”
The trials involve giving Gilead’s Viread and Truvada, the world’s top-selling AIDS medicine, to HIV-negative people from groups most at risk of contracting the virus, such as gay men who have unsafe sex and drug users who share hypodermic needles. Results from five of the studies may be available this year, according to the researchers running them.

One trial, scheduled to report data at an AIDS conference in July, is testing Viread as a vaginal gel in women who apply it before sex. Another is measuring the preventive effect of a daily Truvada pill among 3,000 gay men in six nations.

A further three studies coordinated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Atlanta, are testing PrEP among gay men in the U.S., drug users in Thailand and heterosexuals in Botswana. Gilead, while donating drugs and technical advice, isn’t running the trials, the company said.

Behavior Monitored

The studies are also designed to measure whether people receiving the drugs become riskier in their behavior, in the belief they’re protected against the virus. Participants receive testing, condoms and counseling on ways to avoid infection.

If the tests are successful, PrEP distribution programs could begin in developing countries in 2012, said Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, both of Seattle. He spoke to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee about global health priorities on March 10. The Gates Foundation is sponsoring three PrEP trials.

The CDC would try to issue guidelines on the use of PrEP to health-care providers within six months of successful test results, said Jennifer Horvath, an agency spokeswoman, in an e-mail.

First Defense

“PrEP is the next big thing,” said Warren of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, in a telephone interview. “We have a level of biological plausibility and early data in animal studies that is stronger than anything we have seen in the other approaches.”

Gilead had revenue of $7.01 billion last year, including sales of $5.54 billion from its top three AIDS drugs -- Truvada, Atripla and Viread -- which are taken by 85 percent of HIV patients in the U.S. as a first defense against the virus.

Gilead rose 17 cents, or less than a percent, to $45.64 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading. The shares have increased 1 percent in 12 months. Investors aren’t sure what to make of the PrEP trials, said Jason Kantor, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets in San Francisco.

“This is not currently a focus for investors, and I have nothing in my estimates for this,” Kantor said an e-mail. “Positive data, if compelling, could be a small incremental benefit in the developed countries.”
Implications Unknown PrEP sales in the U.S. may range from “negligible” to as much as $1 billion annually, depending on the effectiveness of the drugs and how much patients and public-health agencies are willing to pay for prevention, Leerink’s Schimmer said.

Gilead itself doesn’t know what the commercial implications of PrEP might be, said Jim Rooney, the company’s director of clinical affairs.

“It’s going to depend upon the data,” Rooney said in a phone interview. “And it’s going to depend upon how the public- health officials evaluate the data and translate that into recommendations for clinical practice.”

Gilead will decide whether to seek regulatory approval of its drugs for prevention once results of the trials are known, Rooney said.
Doctors would be able to prescribe the medicines for prevention without the approval. A study published last year in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes found that among 277 gay men in Boston, one had used PrEP and 74 percent said they would use it if it were available.

Breast Milk

Drugs made by GlaxoSmithKline Plc of London and Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH of Ingelheim, Germany, are already used to prevent infected mothers from passing the virus to their babies in the womb or through breast milk. Glaxo’s Combivir is prescribed to prevent infections in men who take it after unprotected sex with an HIV-positive partner.

Those medicines show that using treatments as prevention can work, said Dawn Smith, a CDC researcher who is devising the agency’s plans to implement PrEP if the clinical trials succeed.
“I’m very hopeful that this approach will help to reduce HIV infection rates,” Smith said in a telephone interview. “But I’m enough of a scientist to be skeptical as well, and to want to see the trial results before I call myself a believer.”

Gilead’s drugs subdue HIV in infected patients by blocking an enzyme the virus needs to hijack cells in order to reproduce. Taken preemptively, the pills may prevent HIV from gaining a foothold when it first enters the body.

‘Good Reason’

A study presented at the Conference on Retroviruses & Opportunistic Infections, in Montreal last year, found Truvada cut the risk of infection almost 16-fold in monkeys. A 2007 trial of PrEP among 936 women in Africa concluded that a daily Viread pill cut the risk of infection by 65 percent, though the researchers said the trial didn’t produce enough data to prove conclusively that PrEP worked.
“From a scientific standpoint, there really is a good reason to believe that if properly done, it will work,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, based in Bethesda, Maryland, said at this year’s retroviruses conference, held in San Francisco in February.
There may be less reason to think PrEP is feasible, Fauci said.

“If we can’t get 70 percent of the people who are infected in low- and middle-income countries on therapy, how are we going to get people who aren’t even infected on therapy?” Fauci said.
If it does work, PrEP won’t come cheap. Giving Truvada to the 100,000 most at-risk gay men in the U.S. would cost more than $1 billion a year, the CDC said on its Web site. That sum covers only the cost of the pills, and doesn’t include marketing, HIV testing, and doctors’ visits.

‘Deep Down Horror’

Identifying people who are at sufficient risk of contracting HIV to receive PrEP will most likely be too difficult in Africa, where everyone who is sexually active is at risk, said Francois Venter, president of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society, a professional group based in Johannesburg.
“Deep down I have this horror that we’ll have an effective intervention very few people are going to use,” Venter said in a telephone interview. “In America and Europe it’s probably going to be one of several interventions which are going to work. I worry that there hasn’t been enough focus on who’s going to take these drugs in my environment.”

To justify the expense of handing out drugs to people who don’t have HIV, the trials need to show that PrEP lowers the chances of infection by at least half, said Francoise Barre- Sinoussi, a French researcher who shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine after helping to discover that HIV causes AIDS.

‘Little Bit Concerned’

“We will have encouraging information from those trials,” Barre-Sinoussi said in an interview in Singapore. “I’m just a little bit concerned about how to apply it at large scale.”
About 33 million people live with HIV, according to UNAIDS, the coalition of United Nations agencies formed to fight HIV. In 2008, 2.7 million people were newly infected with the virus and 2 million died from AIDS-related complications. Africa has 7 in every 10 of the world’s cases.
Assuming PrEP could prevent 50 percent of infections, it would almost cut in half the lifetime risk of catching HIV among high-risk gay men in the U.S., and almost triple the lifetime treatment costs, according to a computer simulation published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases in March 2009.

PrEP is “unlikely to confer sufficient benefits to justify the current costs” of Truvada in the U.S., researchers from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and Harvard Medical School in Boston wrote in the study. The model assumed a drug cost of $753 a month for each patient.

Drug Costs Gilead sells a month’s supply of Viread to U.S. wholesalers for about $643. A month of Truvada costs about $930, said Cara Miller, a company spokeswoman, in an e-mail. The company charges people in poor countries about $17 a month for Viread and $26 for Truvada, she said. About 700,000 people worldwide take brand-name or generic versions of Gilead’s AIDS drugs, Miller said.
When the first AIDS drugs were approved in the U.S. in 1987, critics said they weren’t affordable in poor nations, the CDC’s Smith said. Now, about 40 percent of the patients who need them are getting the medicines, according to UNAIDS. PrEP may also prove more adoptable than its critics think, Smith said.

“If it’s highly efficacious, and if countries and UNAIDS and WHO and other public health agencies believe that it has a role to play in reducing new HIV infections, then we will find a way to make it available,” Smith said.

To contact the reporters on this story: Simeon Bennett in Singapore at sbennett9@bloomberg.net; Tom Randall in New York at trandall6@bloomberg.net

CDC to Increase Funding for HIV Testing, Focusing on Disproportionately Affected Groups

2010-04-07T02:25:00.000-05:00

SUMMARY: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control
an Prevention (CDC) announced last week that it
will expand an ongoing campaign to encourage
HIV testing, extending the program for 3 more
years and providing more than $31 million in
additional funding to state and local health
departments. The testing initiative will continue to
focus on African-Americans -- who have the
highest HIV rates relative to population -- and will
now include additional emphasis on other heavily
affected groups including gay and bisexual men,
Latino men and women, and injection drug users.

Below is the text of a CDC announcement describing the program. Information about applying for testing grants is available online.

CDC Announces $31.5 Million Expansion of
Successful HIV Testing Initiative to Ensure that
More Americans Learn Their HIV Status

More than 1.4 Million Americans Tested To-Date
Through Current Initiative

April 1, 2010 -- Following the success of an initiative through which more than 1.4 million Americans have been tested for HIV, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced today a new three-year, $31.5 million expansion of the program. Funding for the new phase of the initiative is expected to total approximately $142.5 million over the next three years, and will be provided to state and local health departments across the country to increase access to testing and early diagnosis of HIV.

The initiative, originally designed to increase testing and knowledge of HIV status primarily among African-American men and women, will now reach more U.S. jurisdictions and populations at risk. These include gay and bisexual men, as well as male and female Latinos and injection drug users. The new phase will build on the progress of the previous effort and ensure that many more Americans know their status. The HIV testing services will focus on areas across the nation where these populations are hardest hit.

"HIV testing is a crucial step in reducing new HIV infections, so that those infected with HIV can be linked to medical care and ongoing support to help them maintain safer behaviors," said Kevin Fenton, MD, director of CDC's National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention. "This expansion will help ensure that more Americans have access to what could be life-saving information about their HIV status."

The current initiative began in 2007 and will end in September 2010 when the new project begins. In the first two years of this three-year initiative, more than 10,000 HIV-infected individuals were newly diagnosed, with 75 percent linked to care. Most tests (62 percent) were conducted among African-American men and women.

Most of the current project's funds have been used to implement routine, voluntary HIV testing in health care settings, as recommended by CDC's 2006 Revised Recommendations for HIV Testing of Adults, Adolescents, and Pregnant Women in Health Care Settings. Funds helped jurisdictions to establish the partnerships and infrastructure required to make routine HIV testing in these settings a reality. The new phase of the initiative will continue to make this a priority.

"Far too many Americans with HIV -- more than 200,000 people -- are unaware of their infection and may be unknowingly transmitting the virus to others," said Jonathan Mermin, MD, director of CDC's Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. "The expansion of this initiative reflects CDC's continued commitment to ensure that far more Americans are tested for HIV, especially among vulnerable men and women most in need of HIV services."

Beginning today, eligible jurisdictions can apply for the funds, which will be awarded in August for the three-year initiative that begins the following month. The number of areas eligible for this cycle of funding has been increased from 25 to 30 jurisdictions. These 30 jurisdictions represent the areas with the most severe HIV epidemics among African-Americans, Latinos, injection drug users, and gay and bisexual men of all races.

For more information, please visit www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/funding/PS10-10138/index.htm.
4/6/10

Source
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). CDC Announces $31.5 Million Expansion of Successful HIV Testing Initiative to Ensure that More Americans Learn Their HIV Status. Press release. April 1, 2010.

Pot and AIDS: Worldwide epidemic for our time

2010-04-04T15:03:00.000-05:00

Sam Contakos For The Tribune-Democrat

— More than 30 years ago, before the advent of AIDS, a marked decrease in the presence of T-cells in chronic marijuana smokers (one to seven times per week for one to eight years) was known.

This scientific fact indicated a disturbance of the individual’s immunological function.

In some subjects, there was also a decrease in B-cell rosette formation.

The decrease in T-cells is transient, lasting 24 to 72 hours post-smoking. The use of alcohol or tobacco did not contribute to the damage and decrease of the T-cell.

In the early 1980s, the young adult male “gay” population was afflicted with a devastating epidemic, unknown before, but finally named AIDS. The mechanism of this disease was a failure of the immune system. After a few years the causative agent was found to be the HIV virus, which attacks the T-cells of victims.

The correlation between marijuana’s widespread use in the homosexual population with the attendant decrease in T-cells and the affinity of the HIV virus for the damaged T-cells has been largely ignored.

Cannabis is the most widely available and used drug for those who suffer despair and alienation in their daily lives. It alleviates the pain of hunger. It makes life more bearable.

But, it does nothing to cure the cause of sufferings.

It does nothing to truly improve the quality of life.

We should look about us. In those areas of the world where the use of cannabis is accepted, or even encouraged, for its salutary effects, the incidence of AIDS is astronomical.

Many good people see that cannabis does indeed make life more bearable for themselves and others, but they remain content to feel good and do nothing to cure the causes of pain and discontent.

A dictator can go his merry way because his subjects are content. He can ignore his responsibilities which transported to the drug-induced heaven of his imagination.

By subduing the responsibility of morality, pot becomes not the gateway drug to stronger substances, but the promoter of licentious behavior. Many a young boy or girl has been seduced with pot and introduced to the HIV virus.

But still I hear experts or physicians proclaim that further studies are needed to determine whether THC should be legal or remain illegal.

One must wonder: Is this indecisiveness due to ignorance or to be politically correct?

Are these studies to benefit the patients or the investigator?

Sam Contakos is a retired Johnstown businessman and former practicing physician. He also formerly served as a lecturer on the topic of drug abuse.

HIV drugs could have second life as treatment for retrovirus correlated with prostate cancer

2010-04-03T04:58:00.000-05:00

Some medications already being used to treat HIV appear to inhibit a retrovirus that has been linked to prostate cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome, reports a new study published online April 1 in PLoS ONE.

Like HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), XMRV (xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus) is a retrovirus that infects host cells with its RNA through reverse transcriptase enzymes, using protease enzymes to process proteins for viral assembly and integrase enzymes to help infect the host cell's DNA. Many of the drugs approved to treat HIV target one of these processes to slow or prevent host cells from becoming infected.

After testing 28 approved drugs on XMRV cultures, researchers found that four of the medications (raltegravir, L-000870812, Zidovudine (AZT) and tenofovir disoproxil fumarate) were able to stop XMRV from replicating. Two of the drugs are reverse transcriptase inhibitors, and the others (including raltegravir, which worked the best) are integrase enzyme inhibitors.

In addition to the similar success of the drugs' compounds, the researchers found that the use of the antiretrovirals might do well to follow HIV treatment protocol, in which multiple treatments are often used together. "These drugs inhibited XMRV at lower concentrations when two of them were used together, suggesting that highly potent 'cocktail' therapies might inhibit the virus from replicating and spreading," Raymond Schinazi, a professor of pediatrics and chemistry at Emory University's Center for AIDS Research, said in a prepared statement. "This combination of therapies might also have the added benefit of delaying or even preventing the virus from mutating into forms that are drug-resistant."

XMRV is one of only a few retroviruses known in humans and was found in 2006. Since then, some studies have found a correlation between it and some forms of prostate cancer (which is the second most common cancer among men) as well as chronic fatigue syndrome (estimated to affect four to 10 people per thousand). Other studies have had mixed results, so the implications of the results hinge largely on future findings about this retrovirus's role in human disease. "It is not yet clear if any illnesses are directly caused by XMRV," the researchers wrote in their study. But "our data indicates that XMRV infections might be prevented or treated with specific antiviral agents."

And if the retrovirus does prove to play a role in causing illnesses, the findings could help in designing clinical trials to test the treatments in vivo.

In the meantime, Ila Singh, an associate professor of pathology at the University of Utah School of Medicine and lead author on the new study, concluded in a prepared statement that, "These results offer hope to infected persons."

Canada cuts off funding to international AIDS vaccine project

2010-04-02T00:02:00.000-05:00

Between 2001 and 2008, the Canadian International Development Agency contributed nearly $80 million to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, one of the biggest backers of HIV vaccine trials in the developing world. Canada was one of IAVI's major funders.

Photograph by: Valentina Petrova, AFP/Getty Images

OTTAWA — Canada has pulled the plug on funding to one of the largest AIDS vaccine development agencies in the world.

Between 2001 and 2008, the Canadian International Development Agency contributed nearly $80 million to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, one of the biggest backers of HIV vaccine trials in the developing world. Canada was one of IAVI's major funders.

In 2009, Canada contributed nothing to the organization and said funding was under review. There was no money again in this year's federal budget and no decision on whether IAVI will ever receive Canadian funding again.

"IAVI was informed in July 2009 that CIDA funding priorities are under review, and that no further commitments could be made at that time," an IAVI spokeswoman told the Winnipeg Free Press.
A spokeswoman for International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda reiterated that sentiment in a statement recently emailed to the Winnipeg Free Press.

"CIDA continues to focus its efforts as part of the aid effectiveness agenda," Jessica Fletcher said. "As such, we are currently reviewing all of our programming. No decision has been made yet on the future of this program."

Stephen Lewis, co-director of AIDS Free World in the U.S. and former UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, said the global AIDS research community now knows Canada can't be counted on to help.

"This government is now abandoning one of the greatest vaccine initiatives in the world," said Lewis, who is on the board of IAVI. "I just think it's unconscionable."
IAVI President Dr. Seth Berkley has thus far received no response to three letters he sent Jan. 25 to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Oda and Industry Minister Tony Clement asking them to reinstate the funding.

"CIDA's ongoing support is critical in sustaining the momentum in the search for an AIDS vaccine," wrote Berkley in the letters.

He said Canada's funding has helped leverage other support. In 2007, when Canada announced its own Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative, Canada committed that the CHVI "would not compromise Canada's international support of AIDS vaccines."

The CHVI is a $139-million, five-year joint venture between Canada and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It was announced to great fanfare in February 2007.

But three years later, less than $9 million has been spent on CHVI, including almost $700,000 on a proposed $88-million vaccine production facility which was scrapped last month. The Winnipeg-based International Centre for Infectious Diseases was the front-runner for the facility.

IAVI was also one of the partners of that Winnipeg-based bid.

Lewis said Canada presumably has $88 million from the vaccine facility it could use to reinstate its funding of IAVI.

"They have the money and they allegedly have the interest, but (the government is) now abandoning what is absolutely necessary in dealing with AIDS," Lewis said. "Ultimately, the only thing that is going to end this virus is a vaccine."

Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq and Public Health chief Dr. David Butler-Jones have both said they are examining all the options for how to spend the CHVI money now that the production plant is off the table.

Both say it was cancelled when none of the bidders met all the criteria and the Gates Foundation produced an analysis suggesting such a facility was no longer needed.

The focus is still on helping develop a vaccine for AIDS, a spokeswoman from PHAC said.
NDP health critic and Winnipeg MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis said the government obviously has no clue about the global realities of the AIDS epidemic.

"Cutting the vaccine production facility is a blow to Canada's international reputation as a leader in AIDS research and now we will be embarrassingly absent from the global call for continued research into HIV prevention," said Wasylycia-Leis.

MAC donates $2.5 million to HIV and AIDS fund

2010-03-30T12:57:00.000-05:00

www.easier.com

Meet the new voices of Viva Glam, Lady Gaga and Cyndi Lauper. They love lipstick, they love fashion, and they want to tell girls all over the world how to keep their love life safe, seductive and satisfying with eyes wide open to the facts about women and HIV/AIDS.

These sizzling, sensuous self-created divas are channeling their high-voltage energy for Viva Glam and igniting ‘From Our Lips’ - the new MAC Cosmetics Viva Glam campaign. In honour of all of the women who are living with the HIV/AIDS virus, and those working to curb its spread, the MAC AIDS Fund will announce $2.5 million in donations to fund model programs that address the vulnerabilities and inequities that place women at increased risk for HIV/AIDS.

"We're raising the Viva Glam bar this year with the voices of two incredible artists. Lady Gaga and Cyndi Lauper are bringing women's issues to the forefront of the HIV/AIDS crisis. We have one artist that hit the music industry at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, and another that is explosively popular with young people today. They represent different generations that are equally as affected by this disease, and both are helping to spread the message of the power of one lipstick." said John Demsey, Group President, Estee Lauder Companies and Chairman, MAC AIDS Fund.

House of Numbers

Did science really cure the first case of HIV (aka AIDS)?

Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize Winner, Takes Homeopathy Seriously

Daily Pill Greatly Lowers AIDS Risk, Study Finds

A version of this article appeared in print on November 24, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.

Pastor: "Jesus Was HIV-Positive"

One in 22 Blacks will get HIV, CDC Report Says

Sex Survey at D.C. School Sparks Controversy

Inappropriate water kills more than war, Hiv/Aids

HIV tests a farce? False HIV positives produced by western blot tests

HIV tests a farce? False HIV positives produced by western blot tests

HIV tests depend on personal opinion, not rigorous science

Western blot HIV test called into question

Why not make the test more accurate?

AIDS Quest to Kill `Sleeping' Virus Enlists Merck Cancer Drug

German singer guilty of infecting partner with AIDS virus

House of Numbers Documentary – Directed By Brent Leung

Chris Nielsen, Shares his Opinion after Watching HoN

The state budget and AIDS policy

By Frank StoppenbachRed Hook

HIV vaccines cause 50 percent false positive rate in HIV tests

HIV tests lack credibility

Why HIV and AIDS vaccines are medically unnecessary

Western medicine causes disease instead of curing it

See this jaw-dropping video clip about the AIDS fraud

HIV drug causes liver damage, admits FDA

Nobel laureate gives homeopathy a boost

Study reveals promise for HIV test

Early detection hope of S.D. researchers

AIDS Budget Faces Reduction

Prevention Efforts by Community Groups Face Cuts

By SUZANNE SATALINE And SHELLY BANJO

Fungus-tainted corn a factor in Africa HIV spread?

Meharry, ministers team up to fight HIV/AIDS in Nashville

Federal grants to support programs

By Andy Humbles • THE TENNESSEAN • June 7, 2010

HIV and AIDS isn’t an easy subject for churches.

Metropolitan Interdenominational and Meharry will operate independent models, but each with a heavy emphasis to equip clergy with the skills and expertise to establish successful HIV and AIDS prevention programs.

House of Numbers Adds Additional Content to its Deluxe Edition DVD

“HOUSE OF NUMBERS” NOW AVAILABLE ACROSS NORTH AMERICA ON VIDEO ON DEMAND

FDA Panel Gives Thumbs Up for Egrifta

From Medscape Medical News

Fran Lowry

Remembering AIDS 2000 – Hope and Controversy in Durban

Suspended Over Naughty Words in H.I.V. Class, Teacher Wins U.S. Ruling

Tuberculosis most deadly of 'neglected' diseases

Santa Cruz Festival Juror Matt Norman Praises House of Numbers

President Obama on the Scientific Method

10 Reasons Why Black People Should Not Take The HIV Tests!

AIDS fraud: The Marketing of an Epidemic exposed in House of Numbers exclusive film clip

"It was a total fraud."

Finally! Get the House of Numbers DVD for yourself

Gwen Stefani Helps Promote HIV/AIDS Treatment in Africa

The raw interview with Luc Montagnier - revealed!

The transcript between Brent Leung and Dr. Luc Montagnier

Analysis of the conversation

What the drug companies don't want you to know about AIDS

More un-cut footage coming your way

Elton John Says Ryan White Turned His Life Around

Ban removed on foreigners with HIV/AIDS

See Dr. James Chin talk about HIV Estimates in the film, House of Numbers.

House of Numbers is coming to the Health Freedom Expo

Attend the Expo

House of Numbers DVD Pre-orders Now Available -- Shipping July 20, 2010

Berkeley scholar in dock over HIV-Aids article

Romania runs out of Aids drugs

HIV/AIDS - Drug Pipeline Analysis and Market Forecasts to 2016

Scope

Reasons to Buy

Annie Lennox Advocating HIV/AIDS Treatment and Prevention

Blogger Review of House of Numbers

Gilead cuts 2010 sales outlook, shares fall

House of Numbers CGI to screen at the Melbourne Int'l Animation Festival

Expectant HIV/Aids women to start on ARV earlier - WHO

United States pledges $2.7 billion for Kenya HIV battle

Photograph by: Simon Maina, AFP/Getty Images

Groups Protest Segregation of Inmates With H.I.V.

A version of this brief appeared in print on April 15, 2010, on page A18 of the New York edition.

H&M launches third Fashion Against AIDS! campaign

City Endorses New Policy for Treatment of H.I.V.

By Frank Stoppenbach
Red Hook