Health News Update

HIV News Update – Is there a Cure?

Most recently, in health news in the media, we’ve been hearing the news on a possible HIV cure. This renews interest and hope in finding a cure for this disease. Recently German scientists used a bone marrow transplant for a cancer patient who also had AIDS and discovered that the virus had been eradicated. Four years later, this patient still shows no sign of the HIV infection in his system. This news, HIV which has killed over 25 million people worldwide since the 1980s, certainly renews hope that scientists may be able to use bone marrow transplant technology in the treatment of people with HIV. The research is still to be followed up. This HIV health news is written by Maggie Fox of Reuters.

Doctors declare ‘cure’ in HIV patient

German researchers who used a bone marrow transplant to treat a cancer patient with the AIDS virus, have declared him cured of the virus — a stunning claim in a field where the word “cure” is barely whispered.

The patient, who had both HIV infection and leukemia, received the bone marrow transplant in 2007 from a donor who had a genetic mutation known to give patients a natural immunity to the virus.
Nearly four years after the transplant, the patient is free of the virus and it does not appear to be hiding anywhere in his body, Thomas Schneider of Berlin Charite hospital and colleagues said.

“Our results strongly suggest that cure of HIV has been achieved in this patient,” they wrote in the journal Blood. AIDS researchers have rejected the approach on any kind of scale for patients with HIV. A bone marrow transplant is a last-ditch treatment for cancers such as leukemia.

It requires destruction of a patient’s own bone marrow — itself a harrowing process — and then a transplant from a donor who has a near-exact blood and immune system type. Months of recovery are needed while the transplant grows and reconstitutes the patient’s immune system.

“It’s not practical and it can kill people,” said Dr. Robert Gallo of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland, who helped discover the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS.

“It is possibly a cure, that’s for sure, you won’t know for absolute sure until the person dies and undergoes extreme PCR (genetic) analysis of post-mortem tissue.”

The mutation affects a receptor, a cellular doorway, called CCR5, that the AIDS virus uses to get into the cells it infects.

Since the 1990s scientists have known that some people, mostly of Northern European descent, have the mutation and are rarely infected with HIV.

“They are uninfectable, virtually,” Gallo said.
Some researchers are working on the idea of gene therapy to treat or try to cure HIV, but the technology is still in experimental stages.

“I don’t want to throw cold water on an interesting thing, but that’s what it is — an interesting thing,” Gallo said.

Schneider’s team has been following the patient, taking samples from his colon, liver, spinal fluid and brain as he developed various conditions that justified the tests. They tested all these samples for evidence of the virus, which can be difficult to detect unless it is actively infecting cells.

All these places are suspected “reservoirs” where HIV can hide out for years, to rebound in patients who stop taking drugs that suppress the infection.

This patient appears to have a fully functioning immune system, they found, which appears genetically identical to cells from the donor — not the patient’s own immune cells. Schneider’s team found no evidence of HIV anywhere.

“From these results, it is reasonable to conclude that cure of HIV infection has been achieved in this patient,” they wrote.

The AIDS virus infects 33 million people globally and has killed more than 25 million since the pandemic began in the 1980s. Cocktails of strong drugs can suppress the virus, keeping patients healthy and reducing the chance they will infect others, but there is no vaccine.

PrEP HIV Drug May Prevent HIV Infection

Health Research in HIV news:

A very recent study by the New England Journal of Medicine has found that with 2,500 men taking the drug used to treat those infected with HIV may also be used to lower the rate of HIV infection among gay and bisexual men.  The pill is taken one time per day and reduced the infection rate by approximately 44 per cent than by those given the placebo.  The study, dubbed pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, also has demonstrated that those who stuck with the daily regimen of one pill per day had a 73 per cent decreased rate of infection than those taking the placebo.

The antiretroviral drugs emtricitabine and tenofovir used in the study have demonstrated that prevention methods reduce the rate of HIV infection risk and could show promise in halting the global spread of HIV, especially in countries with high rates of HIV, such as sub-Saharan Africa, India and Asia.  The study has only investigated the possibilities of preventing infection with gay and bisexual men.  It has not been tested on women.  This article comes from the CTV News site.

“The … study proves that PrEP provides important additional protection against HIV when offered with other prevention methods such as HIV testing, counselling, condom use and management of sexually transmitted infections,” he said. “As with other prevention methods, the greatest protection comes with consistent use.”

Grant said the medication, which combines the antiretroviral drugs emtricitabine and tenofovir, could become an important tool in trying to halt the global spread of HIV, especially in hard-hit countries in sub-Saharan Africa, India and Asia.

But Dr. Philip Berger, a long-time Canadian AIDS specialist, said it’s hard to imagine countries that have difficulty paying for medications to treat people already infected with HIV-AIDS could afford drugs aimed at preventing the disease.

And Berger, a physician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, questions whether gay and bisexual men who engage in risky sexual behaviour with multiple partners would continue to take a daily preventive pill for what conceivably could be decades.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called the study result “an important finding that provides the basis for further investigating, developing and employing this prevention strategy, which has the potential to make a significant impact in the fight against HIV-AIDS.”

“No single HIV prevention strategy is going to be effective for everyone, and it is important to note that the new findings pertain only to the effectiveness of PrEP among men who have sex with men and cannot at this point be extrapolated to other populations,” Fauci said in a statement.

“Therefore, we must continue to conduct PrEP research among other study populations, such as women and heterosexual men, to provide a comprehensive picture of its potential utility as an HIV prevention tool.”
A total of 2,499 men at high risk of HIV infection participated in the study, which was conducted at 11 sites in Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, South Africa, Thailand and the United States. Half of study participants received the PrEP pill, while the other half were given the placebo.

In all, 64 HIV infections were recorded among the 1,248 study participants chosen at random to receive the dummy pill, while 36 HIV infections were recorded among the 1,251 participants who got the drug.”

Source:  www.CTV.ca

The Rise of the Super bugs

The frequent appearance of Clostridium difficile in hospitals around the world is tracked by countries using different methods. C-difficile is seen as a serious health issue due to its quick rise in the number of cases reported worldwide. C-difficile is one of the superbugs for which there are no known antibiotics that can be used as treatment. There are other superbugs that have come into existence, such as the Klebsiella pneumonia, and Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1), a superbug from India, all which have appeared due to the overuse and over-prescription of antibiotics in recent times. This article appeared on the Reuters website health pages.

Studies show drug-resistant bug threats in Europe

Drug-resistant infections with the “superbug” Clostridium difficile are rising in Europe and are widespread, scientists said on Tuesday, but there are big variations in the way health authorities monitor them.

In a Europe-wide study, researchers found the incidence of C-difficile infections in hospitals had risen to 4.1 per 10,000 patient days in 2008 from 2.45 per 10,000 patient days in 2005.

“It is clearly on the increase, that’s for sure,” said Ed Kuijper of Leiden University Medical Centre in The Netherlands, who led the study with his colleague Martijn Bauer.

“There is also a huge variation of incidence in different European countries — mainly due to the fact that each country uses its own surveillance system and its own diagnostic tests, so in some countries it is underestimated and in other countries it is overestimated.”

Overuse and misuse of antibiotics in recent decades have fuelled a rise in drug-resistant “superbug” infections like C-difficile, a bacterial infection in the gut, and methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus (MRSA). [ID:nL6407857]

Earlier this year, scientists warned that a new so-called superbug from India known as New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1) could spread around the world. [ID:nLDE67A0O1]

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said that up to 400,000 patients in the region suffer multi-drug resistant infections and antibiotic resistance remains a major public health problem.

“SERIOUS THREAT”

Launching a campaign to increase awareness of antibiotic overuse, the ECDC highlighted a particular bug called Klebsiella pneumoniae, a common cause of infection amongst hospital patients, which like NDM-1 is becoming increasingly resistant to powerful last-line antibiotics such as carbapenems.

“Antibiotic resistance remains a serious threat to patient safety, reducing options for treatment and increasing lengths of hospital stay, as well as patient morbidity and mortality,” said ECDC director Marc Sprenger.