Posted by Rachel on February 14, 2010
How’s that for an intro this week? I’ve mentioned my cold sore affliction here previously; I swear I either get them more often and worse than most people, or everybody else is just staying home for a week at a time. I’ll be spending the next week feeling self-conscious due to a huge cold sore front and center on my top lip. Here’s some info on the little buggers:
* MedlinePlus: Herpes labialis
* American Social Health Association: Oral Herpes
* Scarleteen: Hopping Mad About Herpes (includes a nice section on dealing with feelings of “gross”ness.
Related to the previous post, Pam Merritt writes at RHRC on Women of Color and the Anti-Choice Focus on Eugenics. The whole post is well worth a read.
Hilary at Mom’s Tinfoil Hat is talking about reproductive coercion (something we’ve also covered a bit recently at the OBOS blog). My experience of having been told I had to have an exam in order to get my contraceptive refilled is mentioned in the comments.
Random gripe: I find it really annoying that – on the CDC FastStats page for “reproductive health” – the word “abortion” doesn’t appear once. Teen sex, infertility, contraception, pelvic inflammatory disease – yes; abortion – no. FastStats A-Z – also no mention.
Abby Jean writes about poverty and health at FWD/Forward.
Renee at Womanist Musings writes about A Facial For Your Vagina: Exactly What You Never Knew Your Lady Bits Needed. I’m cracking up at her sarcastic “Golly gee whiz beav.” Ha.
Blue Milk writes about The very gendered baby (found via Hoyden).
Academic Ob/gyn has a post on a new emergency contraception drug and expands on some of the limitations of the study I briefly mentioned in an OBOS post on the paper.
Raising Women’s Voices points to a PBS piece on Democrats and abortion.
Finally, and not really health-related, Aunt B posts my favorite version of “Single Ladies” thus far, this time transformed into a song praising academic achievement – “Scholar Ladies.”
Showing posts with label virus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label virus. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
HIV, Stigma, And The Media
Last November, the National Football League devoted the entire month to breast cancer awareness. Players like Reggie Bush wore pink gloves, armbands, even shoes, to promote efforts to fight the disease.
There were some heartwarming moments. Players brought their mothers, grandmothers, and other women who’d battled breast cancer to the games, all of them wearing attractive pink game-day jerseys. Announcers told their own stories of “courageous” battles against the disease waged by friends and family members.
It’s powerful and inspiring, these overpaid hulks of manhood showing they’re secure enough in their masculinity to don feminine-ish garb to support their sisters and mothers.
But try to imagine the NFL — or any sports league — launching a similar campaign to fight HIV and AIDS. Which player would trot out a brother, sister, or father who’s HIV positive? Which television announcer would proudly point to the afflicted and speak of their “inspirational” battle with HIV?
In an NPR interview last week, Theresa Skipper talked about why she concealed her HIV diagnosis for 19 years:
If tell you I had cancer, you’re sympathetic. If I tell you I had diabetes, you’re sympathetic. HIV, you look at me funny and you want to know how I got it. Why is that? It doesn’t even matter at this point. And that’s what I had to get beyond. To get beyond: Yes, I have HIV; this is how I caught it. Now what? You know, now what do we do?
Cancer and diabetes are interesting examples because in many cases both diseases are preventable, just like HIV. If you don’t smoke, you dramatically decrease your chances of getting lung cancer. If you eat healthy foods and get plenty of exercise, you will probably avoid type 2 diabetes. The whole point of a breast cancer “awareness” campaign is to convince women to get screened regularly. Yet few people would eye a woman with breast cancer suspiciously and ask how often she had gotten screened.
Arguably HIV/AIDS awareness is more important than breast cancer awareness because the efficacy of breast-cancer screening for women under 50 is questionable. HIV testing, on the other hand, has much clearer benefits, especially for people in risk groups. With over 50,000 diagnoses of HIV infections in the US each year and over 15,000 deaths, this problem is not going away. Indeed, the HIV infection rate among black males approaches the breast cancer rate in women.
More troubling, the cost of treating HIV is significantly greater than breast cancer. While breast cancer treatment is expensive, with the average total cost per person in one study of nearly $40,000, Charlotte clinician J. Wesley Thompson, who specializes in HIV/AIDS, told me that treating HIV costs an average of $30,000 per year. Over a lifetime, the cost of treating HIV is likely to be more than ten times the cost of treating breast cancer.
The social stigma of AIDS is costing people their lives, their dignity, and it’s costing all of us a lot of money — the Federal government spent nearly $3 billion on AIDS in 2008, not counting drug assistance or medicaid. In addition, all of us pay higher insurance rates to cover HIV/AIDS treatment.
We may only begin to make progress on AIDS when mainstream organizations like the NFL are prepared to launch high-profile awareness campaigns. Until then, HIV and AIDS are likely to remain forgotten diseases in America, with disastrous results for all of us.
*This blog post was originally published at The Daily Monthly*
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Scientists discover origin of HIV transmission among male partners
A team of scientists, led by a virologist from the University of California, San Diego's Center for AID Research (CFAR), has discovered the origin of strains of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) among men who have sex with men. The study, which may be important in developing prevention strategies for HIV, will appear in Science Translational Medicine on February 10, 2010.
"If we want to stop the HIV epidemic, then we must know the mechanisms by which HIV uses human sex to spread," said principal investigator Davey Smith, MD, MAS, associate professor of medicine in UCSD's Division of Infectious Diseases and in the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System, and director of the CFAR Viral Pathogenesis Core.
It is known that most HIV infections worldwide result from exposure to the HIV virus in semen, made up of seminal cells and the fluid around these calls, called seminal plasma. HIV virus particles contain RNA and exist in the plasma, while infected seminal cells contain HIV DNA.
Using a method of comparing genetic characteristics, called phylogenetic analysis, the researchers studied a group of men who had sexually transmitted their HIV virus to other men. Phylogenetic models allow researchers to estimate the dates of origin of various groups of viruses; in this way the team was able to determine the source of rapidly mutating HIV viruses by analyzing the viral sequences extracted from the blood and semen of HIV transmitting partners. The team found that recipients shared a more recent common ancestor with virus from the seminal plasma than with virus found in the seminal cells of their source partner.
"Until now, it had not been established whether HIV RNA or DNA is transmitted during sex," said Smith. "By analyzing the genetic differences between these two forms and the virus that was ultimately transmitted to newly infected individuals we found that it was the HIV RNA form present in seminal plasma that was transmitted."
"The findings from this study will help direct prevention strategies to address the virus in the seminal plasma," Smith said. "By knowing the origin of the transmitted virus, scientists may be able to develop new vaccines, vaginal microbicides and drugs to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted HIV."
Smith notes that because the study involved pairs of men who have sex with men, the findings do not comment directly on HIV transmission to women. "Since the vast majority of women are infected with HIV by exposure to the virus in semen, HIV RNA in the seminal plasma is the likely culprit, but this needs to be confirmed," he said.
University of California - San Diego
Using a method of comparing genetic characteristics, called phylogenetic analysis, the researchers studied a group of men who had sexually transmitted their HIV virus to other men. Phylogenetic models allow researchers to estimate the dates of origin of various groups of viruses; in this way the team was able to determine the source of rapidly mutating HIV viruses by analyzing the viral sequences extracted from the blood and semen of HIV transmitting partners. The team found that recipients shared a more recent common ancestor with virus from the seminal plasma than with virus found in the seminal cells of their source partner.
"Until now, it had not been established whether HIV RNA or DNA is transmitted during sex," said Smith. "By analyzing the genetic differences between these two forms and the virus that was ultimately transmitted to newly infected individuals we found that it was the HIV RNA form present in seminal plasma that was transmitted."
"The findings from this study will help direct prevention strategies to address the virus in the seminal plasma," Smith said. "By knowing the origin of the transmitted virus, scientists may be able to develop new vaccines, vaginal microbicides and drugs to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted HIV."
Smith notes that because the study involved pairs of men who have sex with men, the findings do not comment directly on HIV transmission to women. "Since the vast majority of women are infected with HIV by exposure to the virus in semen, HIV RNA in the seminal plasma is the likely culprit, but this needs to be confirmed," he said.
University of California - San Diego
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Isothermal Titration Calorimetry Measures Energy of Viral Infection
Filed under: in the news...
Scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, Lund University in Sweden, and Universite de Lyon in France have for the first time measured the energy released when a virus injects its DNA into the host. In this case it was a double standed bacteriophage lambda that infected a bacterium with its DNA, but the technique, called isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC), and knowledge derived from it can be applied to other virus types.
Many viruses, whether they infect bacteria, plants or animals, are adept at packing long stretches of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) within their nanometer-sized protein shells. In many of the viruses that contain double-stranded DNA, the DNA gets packaged so tightly that it bends upon itself, resulting in repulsive forces that exert a tremendous amount of pressure on the virus's outer shell, indicating a great amount of stored energy. At the moment of infection, when the DNA is being shot out of the virus, the energy stored in the tightly packed DNA is released and converted into thermal energy.
Evilevitch [Alex Evilevitch, physicist at CMU] used ITC to measure the thermal energy released during genome ejection, which is the same as the stored internal energy that results from genome packaging. His results, which agree with analytical models and computer simulations, show that the heat released increases as DNA length increases. He also discovered that the ordering of water molecules around DNA strands inside the virus (called hydration entropy) has a tremendous influence on the build up of energy. This unpredicted effect was not accounted for in the previous models.
Press release: Carnegie Mellon Physicist the First To Measure Energy Released From a Virus During Infection ...
Abstract in arXiv: DNA heats up : Energetics of genome ejection from phage revealed by isothermal titration calorimetry
Scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, Lund University in Sweden, and Universite de Lyon in France have for the first time measured the energy released when a virus injects its DNA into the host. In this case it was a double standed bacteriophage lambda that infected a bacterium with its DNA, but the technique, called isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC), and knowledge derived from it can be applied to other virus types.
Many viruses, whether they infect bacteria, plants or animals, are adept at packing long stretches of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) within their nanometer-sized protein shells. In many of the viruses that contain double-stranded DNA, the DNA gets packaged so tightly that it bends upon itself, resulting in repulsive forces that exert a tremendous amount of pressure on the virus's outer shell, indicating a great amount of stored energy. At the moment of infection, when the DNA is being shot out of the virus, the energy stored in the tightly packed DNA is released and converted into thermal energy.
Evilevitch [Alex Evilevitch, physicist at CMU] used ITC to measure the thermal energy released during genome ejection, which is the same as the stored internal energy that results from genome packaging. His results, which agree with analytical models and computer simulations, show that the heat released increases as DNA length increases. He also discovered that the ordering of water molecules around DNA strands inside the virus (called hydration entropy) has a tremendous influence on the build up of energy. This unpredicted effect was not accounted for in the previous models.
Press release: Carnegie Mellon Physicist the First To Measure Energy Released From a Virus During Infection ...
Abstract in arXiv: DNA heats up : Energetics of genome ejection from phage revealed by isothermal titration calorimetry
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