Fortis: Insurer Targeted HIV Patients To Drop Coverage

 

17 Mar 2010 17:35:13 GMT
Source: Reuters

In May, 2002, Jerome Mitchell, a 17-year old college freshman from rural South Carolina, learned he had contracted HIV. The news, of course, was devastating, but Mitchell believed that he had one thing going for him: On his own initiative, in anticipation of his first year in college, he had purchased his own health insurance. 

Read the whole story: Reuters http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N16105482.htm
conversation/ comments : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/17/fortis-insurer-targeted-h_n_502475.html#postComment

AIDS drug experiment on blacks, in Washington Times by Terry Michaels

Going too far to battle disease 

Tuesday, March 16
By Terry Michael

A pharmaceutical experiment on hundreds of mostly black homosexual men and heterosexual
women in Washington is about to be undertaken by U.S. AIDS czar Dr. Anthony S. Fauci with the enthusiastic backing of the District's black mayor, Adrian M. Fenty, voiced in a January announcement. The experiment radically departs from medical "best practices" of offering antiretroviral chemotherapy for life to HIV-positive persons only after they exhibit depressed levels of CD4 T-cells and are judged to be at significant risk of contracting opportunistic illnesses associated with AIDS.

The new effort, "test and treat," as it is called, will promote universal voluntary antibody testing of adults accompanied by immediate administration of the drugs despite a wealth of evidence that the chemicals often cause serious adverse side effects - potentially life-threatening effects. However, the experiment isn't focused on individual impact. Instead, it suggests that the goal is a benefit that might accrue to society if the chemicals decrease sexual retrovirus transmission.
One of the world's leading HIV-AIDS experts, Dr. Jay A. Levy of the University of California at San Francisco, responded, "No, I wouldn't," when asked for this article if he would take the drugs if he were a homosexual black man in Washington with a positive antibody test but with normal T-cell counts and no illness.

A conservative voice for years in the drug-intervention debate, Dr. Levy wrote in an article for the San Francisco Chronicle on Feb. 23, 2001: "The persistence of HIV in cells argues for a delay in initiating antiviral treatments. Unless the infected person is sick, the very real problems of long-term treatment must be considered: toxicity which may lead to damage of the pancreas, heart, kidney or brain, emergence of resistant viruses and suppression of the body's natural anti-HIV immune responses." With words presaging the suggestion that immediate drug intervention could have societal benefits with regard to transmission, Dr. Levy wrote, "The increased prevalence of resistant viruses in newly infected people reflects the widespread use of HAART [highly active antiretroviral therapy] and the misconception that this treatment will prevent HIV transmission."
Scheduled to start midyear, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the experiment is based on a controversial Jan. 3, 2009 article in the British medical journal the Lancet by Dr. Reuben Granich of the World Health Organization, titled "Universal voluntary HIV testing with immediate antiretroviral therapy as a strategy for elimination of HIV transmission: a mathematical model."

Director of NIAID for a quarter-century, Dr. Fauci and his director of HIV programs, Carl W. Dieffenbach, announced the experiment with Mr. Fenty on Jan. 12 as part of a larger, $26.4 million study to combat what the District's HIV-AIDS agency claims is a "generalized epidemic" affecting 3 percent of adults and adolescents. Use of the word "epidemic" suggests widespread disease and mortality, though the vast majority of the agency's claimed cases have tested positive only for HIV antibodies and have experienced no illness from AIDS. Research shows "untreated" positives may not experience illness following an HIV test for 10, 15 or 20 years - or ever, in many documented cases.
Dr. Fauci and Mr. Dieffenbach published an article in the June 10, 2009 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association in laudatory response to Dr. Granich's article. "A recent modeling study... reaches provocative conclusions and provides the theoretical basis for a new and potentially important public health policy strategy," they wrote. "This approach, referred to as 'test and treat,' predicts that [with] implementation of an annual voluntary universal HIV testing program for persons older than 15 years and with immediate initiation of [antiretroviral therapy] for those individuals who test positive regardless of their CD4 T-cell count or viral load, the HIV pandemic could be reduced within 10 years."

Critical peer reviews of Dr. Granich's work were published March 28, 2009 in the Lancet, months before Dr. Fauci and Mr. Dieffenbach published their paper. One notable alarm was sounded by Dr. Harold Jaffe of the Department of Public Health at the University of Oxford: "Within the field of communicable diseases, we are aware of little precedent for the approach of 'treating for the common good.' Treatment of diseases such as tuberculosis might have the effect of decreasing transmission, but the primary goal is to decrease morbidity and mortality for the affected person."
Dr. Levy of UC-San Francisco, whose own research has received major funding from NIAID and is sometimes called the "third co-discoverer of HIV," did not directly criticize the Fauci initiative but warned that the test-and-treat theory should be reviewed by an appropriate "human subjects committee."

Statutes mandate such panels for federal projects, a reaction to the U.S. Public Health Service's infamous mid-20th-century Tuskegee study of black men and women intentionally untreated for syphilis.

The local NIAID initiative will be in collaboration with the embattled District HIV-AIDS administration, cited by a Washington Post investigation in 2009 for misallocating millions of dollars, colluding with HIV-AIDS nonprofits siphoning tax dollars for never-delivered services.
The new $26.4 million would be added to the $85 million currently spent annually by the District's HIV-AIDS agency, which employs about 160 people, up from 125 just two years ago, though the number who have died in recent years from broadly defined "AIDS" continues to decline and is little more than the few hundred annual cases of death from accidents in the District. The District HIV-AIDS administration reported that 226 people died in 2006 of AIDS or "AIDS-related" causes, which increasingly are heart, liver and other ailments from adverse effects of antiviral drug treatment. That contrasts with more than a thousand cancer deaths and a thousand who die of heart disease annually in the District.

Not only are there relatively few deaths from AIDS in the District, the number of new AIDS (not HIV) cases reported in 2007 was 648 in a jurisdiction with a total population of slightly more than a half-million. That contrasts with a total of 238 new cases of AIDS reported by Canada in 2007 for its entire population of 34 million. Somehow, there were about 128 new AIDS cases per 100,000 residents in the District, compared with 1.4 per 100,000 in all of Canada - a 9,000 percent difference.
Either Canada is really bad at collecting numbers for an apparently sexually transmitted disease, District residents are hypersexually active, or the District's HIV-AIDS "epidemic" is grossly overstated by an agency charged with ineptness for years and always interested in sustaining its mission and budget.
Terry Michael is a Washington writer. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/17/going-too-far-to-battle-disease/

Indiana man with HIV faces additional charges

by Associated Press
Posted on March 16, 2010
******

FRANKLIN, Ind. (AP) -- A suburban Indianapolis man who failed to warn sexual partners that he has HIV now faces more felony charges.

Johnson County Prosecutor Brad Cooper on Tuesday filed 15 additional charges against 47-year-old Tony Perkins, who used a dating site to meet women after being diagnosed with HIV six years ago.
The Greenwood man already faces up to six years in prison after pleading guilty last month to two counts of failure to warn partners. Cooper says the new counts represent 15 of 24 additional women who have come forward since February.

Police say nine women chose to remain anonymous, so no charges were filed on their behalves.
Cooper says none of the victims has tested positive for HIV so far.
Perkins is jailed without bond.

(Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) http://www.whas11.com/news/Indiana-man-with-HIV-faces-additional-charges-87843867.html

Finances sank HIV vaccine facility bid

'No one is hiding anything,' Aglukkaq tells House committee
 Tuesday, March 16, 2010 | 4:03 PM ET 
CBC News

The decision not to build a planned multimillion-dollar HIV vaccine manufacturing facility in Canada was based on finances, not politics, the country's chief public health officer says.
Dr. David Butler-Jones and Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq both spoke Tuesday to the Commons health committee.

In February, the Public Health Agency of Canada confirmed that a facility to make HIV vaccines used by researchers worldwide in clinical trials wouldn't be built in Canada. The facility would have been the main project in the $111-million Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative, a venture between Canada and the Gates Foundation that was announced three years ago.
In the February announcement, the agency said a study commissioned by the foundation concluded there was enough vaccine manufacturing capacity worldwide to meet research needs.
The four bids came from corporations and universities in Winnipeg, Peterborough, Ont., London, Ont., and Quebec City.

On Tuesday, Butler-Jones told MPs that peer reviewers ranked the four bids internally on scientific merit to advise the department. But none of the bids met key criteria of sustainability or financial capacity to continue, Butler-Jones said.
"There was a fair and open process," Butler-Jones said in response to questions to the minister on the review process from NDP health critic Judy Wasylycia-Leis. "You suggest somehow I would alter that. That's untrue," he said.

"No one is hiding anything," agreed Aglukkaq.

Gates and others in the field recognized that the research capacity issue was addressed in the past 18 months, which wasn't the case two or three years ago when the bidding process began, Butler-Jones said.

Both Butler-Jones and Aglukkaq said funding earmarked for the facility is still going to the Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative. The federal government and the Gates Foundation are discussing how the money will be used.

Isotope costs

Bidders had spent up to $2 million, including $750,000 by Winnipeg, opposition MPs said.
Aglukkaq also answered questions about the shortage of medical isotopes. The price of available isotopes has gone up, and the world's two biggest isotope producers, Canada and the Netherlands, have taken their reactors offline.

The Dutch reactor will be shut down for six months and Canada's reactor in Chalk River, Ont., is not expected to be running until the end of May.

Aglukkaq said she has "committed to having discussions" with provinces and territories about the extra overtime costs they've faced in paying health-care workers mitigating the isotope shortage by working on evenings and weekends.

Liberal health critic Carolyn Bennett said the government should just go ahead and agree to pay the bill.

"Once you get the numbers from them, minister, will you be able to reimburse them for the money they've had to spend in hospitals and clinics because there have been no isotopes?" Bennett asked.
Aglukkaq replied that she has not received cost information from provinces and would not speculate on if they will be reimbursed.

The government is trying to help ease the shortage by turning to isotopes now being made at a refurbished reactor in Poland.

"We have expedited the reviews for submissions to increase the supply in Canada," Aglukkaq said.
Conservatives will also reintroduce bill C-6, a proposed consumer product safety bill that aims to modernize Health Canada's response to protect children from injury such as the power to search for, seize and recall dangerous consumer products. Aglukkaq gave the example of recalling cribs for amputation risk.

Before Parliament prorogued, Liberal senators tried to alter the bill in December with amendments to protect entrepreneurs and homeowners from its search-and-seizure provisions.


Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2010/03/16/hiv-vaccine-isotopes-aglukkaq-butler-jones.html?ref=rss#ixzz0iNOtRaAp

Help millions of young adults/children cope psychologically, emotionally and physically who live with or have lost their moth...

The Somwa Foundation

Hundreds of thousands of children across the world lose their mother to AIDS, or is the primary caregiver for their family do to their mother living with HIV. The Somwa Foundation primary focus is to act as a breath of fresh air for the entire family. If we do not take care of HIV positive women children, the system will. http://www.thesomwafoundation.com/home.html

Mississippi Department of Corrections to end segregation of HIV inmates

The Associated Press
JACKSON, Miss. -- Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps says the Mississippi prison system will end the practice of keeping male HIV-positive inmates in segregated units.

Starting in May, Epps says male HIV-positive inmates will be allowed into general prison population. Epps said he plans to gradually implement the policy while moving 152 prisoners housed at the state penitentiary at Parchman to prisons throughout the system.

The ACLU brought suit against the state in 1990 on behalf of HIV-positive prisoners housed at Parchman to force the state to provide proper medical care.
In 2005, U.S. Magistrate Jerry Davis ruled Mississippi Department of Corrections had addressed problems with prisoner conditions, ending the suit.

Epps told The Clarion-Ledger he would have ended segregation of the prisoners then, but the ACLU asked they be kept separate.

"The ACLU asked us not to (move the prisoners) because they were concerned about the inmates going out into general population as it relates to their safety," Epps said. "After they contacted me and asked me about it, I said, 'Well, this would have been done if you hadn't asked me not to do it.'"
ACLU spokesman Will Matthews said the organization initially was concerned prisoners held in the unit would be ostracized and subject to possible violence if they were introduced into the general population.

Epps said female HIV-positive inmates already are housed among the general population. A small number of HIV-positive male inmates are serving their time in low-security community correctional facilities, he said.

Epps said MDOC has 258 male and female inmates with HIV or AIDS.
He said there are 5,621 inmates with medical conditions ranging from failing kidneys to heart disease.
"Those are some staggering numbers for a population of 21,000 people," he said.
Information from: The Clarion-Ledger.

Read more: http://www.thestate.com/2010/03/17/1204778/mdoc-to-end-segregation-of-hiv.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter#ixzz0iXr7ot1M

Annie Lennox trying to get world to see changing face of AIDS. On CNN Christiane Amanpour Show

By Tom Evans, CNN
March 13, 2010 12:50 p.m. EST

Watch Annie Lennox on "Amanpour" at 2100 CET Sunday on CNN International, at 2 p.m. ET Sunday on CNN, or podcast @ amanpour.com/podcast.

(CNN) -- Singer and activist Annie Lennox wants the world to know that the HIV virus and the debilitating condition it causes, AIDS, are the leading killers of women of reproductive age in the world.

"The world needs to wake up and realize that the HIV/AIDS pandemic has changed its face since the 1980s. It has been affecting women and children at an enormous rate," Lennox told CNN's Christiane Amanpour in an interview aired Friday.
"As a woman and a mother myself, I want to contribute to keeping this issue on the table. HIV is invisible," she added.

"You have swine flu, you have bird flu, and everybody is up in arms. But this has been a killer for years and it's not getting any better."

Lennox this month went to the United Nations headquarters in New York to help launch a five-year action plan to provide recommendations on how to address the disproportionate impact of HIV/AIDS on women and girls worldwide.
Health officials acknowledge that great strides have been made addressing HIV/AIDS as a whole. But they say when it comes to women and girls, the world has made little progress.
Lennox said her intention is not to shock, but to break stigmas on the subject, by using the power of her music.

"Music is a great vehicle for communications, and I have a certain platform. I have an opportunity and I have to take it," she said. "As a woman, and as a mother and as an artist, it's something that I feel compelled to do. Otherwise it would be a complete waste."
Lennox said she has been very focused on this issue since she heard former South African President Nelson Mandela describe HIV/AIDS as "genocide" in 2003.
"To hear Mandela describe the HIV pandemic as a genocide really almost knocked me off my chair," she said.

"You know in South Africa, post-apartheid, one in every three pregnant women is carrying HIV. That is hugely significant. If they don't have intervention, the baby will be born with the virus. That baby will probably last, maybe a year."

Lennox added that a woman is raped every minute in South Africa, a country that is believed to have more people infected with HIV/AIDS than any other nation.
"You're seeing women especially, and young girls and young children, right at the front of the devastation. And it breaks my heart."

Asked whether she thinks the next generation will take up the HIV/AIDS issue as energetically as she has, Lennox said, "Unless people campaign in civil society, unless governments and leaderships campaign and keep the issue on the table, it's very hard to say." http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/03/13/annie.lennox.aids/index.html?eref=igoogle_cnn