Word: hiv
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Hoping to sharply cut HIV/AIDS transmission rates in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took the unusual step of recommending that doctors ask all patients from ages 13 to 64 whether they want to be tested for the virus. One in four Americans living with HIV don't know they are infected; for them, early diagnosis could mean early treatment and longer lives. Antiretroviral drug therapy has already saved nearly 3 million years of life in the U.S. alone. Meanwhile, the number of people living with HIV/AIDS around the world continues to grow, to 40 million...
Leave it to a child to get to the heart of the matter. For years, giving antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to children living with AIDS in the poorest parts of the world was perceived as a lost cause. It's hard enough, the experts thought, to get ARVs to pregnant, HIV-positive women to reduce the chances they will infect their babies in utero or at birth. Pediatric versions of the drugs are expensive, and cutting down an adult dose of the medication to give it to a child is tricky. Without treatment, however, nearly a third of HIV-positive infants...
...need is great. More than 2 million children in Africa under age 15 are living with HIV, according to a study published last week by UNAIDS and the World Health Organization. Of these youngsters, perhaps 660,000 are sick enough to require medical intervention. Yet only 1 in 20 children who need ARVs get them. In addition, fewer than 1 in 10 HIV-positive mothers receive the drugs they need to keep from transmitting the virus to their newborns...
...rich countries of the world throw up our hands in despair. Not so Dr. Mark Kline of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "If you focus on the enormity of the problem, you'll never get started," says Kline, who has cared for hundreds of HIV-positive children over the years in the U.S. and has seen many of them grow old enough to have children of their own (see box). "You have to tackle it piece by piece...
...Dealing with the still rampant stigma over HIV remains a challenge as well. "The nurses scold me for 'talking too loud about HIV' while I'm [on rounds seeing patients]," Sarah Kim writes a month after arriving in Lesotho. "Sometimes I feel like saying, 'well the majority of this ward is positive so we have to talk about it!' But I realize that I shouldn...