New York County Legislator Predicts HIV Epidemic If Marriage Equality Passes (Surprise! He's a Republican)

As the New York Senate prepares to vote on marriage equality, Sam Trombley (R), a member of the Clinton County Legislature, argued that homosexuality is a public health risk: “I’m surprised the health department has not come out against this because we are going to have an HIV epidemic if this passes.” He added, “You don’t see two male dogs sleeping in the same dog house together.”

{Because what he said wasn’t stupid or homophobic enough… He felt the need to add to it. Good Grief.}

From AmericaBlog: Cured of HIV?

 This is amazing news.

I remember hearing of research in Africa a few years ago that mentioned some women who were immune but did not know that there were so many others. One percent is small but still, one percent of all Caucasians adds up. There’s a lot of work ahead to improve the chances for success with this treatment but it’s an incredibly big step in the right direction.

There’s not much good news when it comes to this devastating disease. But that is perhaps why the story of the man scientists call the “Berlin patient” is so remarkable and has generated so much excitement among the HIV advocacy community.

Timothy Ray Brown suffered from both leukemia and HIV when he received a bone marrow stem cell transplant in Berlin, Germany in 2007. The transplant came from a man who was immune to HIV, which scientists say about 1 percent of Caucasians are. (According to San Francisco’s CBS affiliate, the trait may be passed down from ancestors who became immune to the plague centuries ago.)

What happened next has stunned the dozens of scientists who are closely monitoring Brown: His HIV went away.

Possible Cure for HIV Found

Timothy Brown, a forty-two year old American man living in Berlin, Germany was given a bone marrow transplant in 2007 to treat leukemia.  The transplant — which treats leukemia by essentially rebooting the body’s immune system and creating new white blood cells —also had the benefit of wiping out the HIV infection.

Just following World AIDS Day, and three and a half years later, the patient remains HIV-free, which suggests he is cured of the disease, the researchers said.

“I’m extremely excited about the result,” said Jerome Zack, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies HIV infection and was not involved in the study. “It suggests that at least in this one individual, there’s a long-term benefit to this approach.”

In the transplant, the patient received bone marrow, which contains blood stem cells, from a donor with a rare mutation. The mutation essentially prevents the most common form of HIV from getting inside certain immune cells. Afterward, the virus appeared to stop replicating in the patient’s body, and he no longer needed HIV antiretroviral medication.

The findings for Brown’s case were published in the journal Blood this week where the study’s author Kristina Allers writes, “Our results strongly suggest that cure of HIV has been achieved in this patient.”

{To continue reading, click the headline.}

Declining Biodiversity Speeds Spreading Of Disease

The unassuming opossum, a soft gray marsupial that slinks around at night, glimpsed by the occasional car headlight, is an unlikely mediator in the spread of Lyme disease. But scientists have found that the opossum, whose claws are well-suited to picking off the irksome ticks that try to bite them, can actually serve as a biological buffer between the Lyme bacterium and the humans it sickens.

But what happens when the opossum’s habitat – the Northeast forest — is bulldozed? Lyme disease hops aboard the white-footed mouse, a species less adept at killing piggybacking ticks, and less reliant on the forest for survival.

The tale of the opossum in one of many in a review article published in Nature this week, which details how a loss in biodiversity more often than not increases the transmission of disease. As humans have disrupted ecosystems around the world, it seems we have helped to unlock some diseases we’d never encountered before, like HIV and SARS, and aided the spread of others that already afflict us.

In 2009, there were 30,000 new confirmed cases of Lyme disease in the United States, up from about 12,000 in 1995. Scientists have sought many explanations for this uptick. But one detailed in the paper is the explosion of mice, deer and other tick hosts with the demise of their predators and fellow forest dwellers.

World AIDS Day comes amid progress, concern

As the global community commemorates World AIDS Day on Wednesday, international health organizations report both promising and sobering trends.

While the United Nations says new HIV infections have declined by almost 20 percent worldwide over the past decade, the estimated number of children living with HIV or AIDS in 11 Asian countries has increased by 46 percent between 2001 and 2009, the World Health Organization’s South-East Asia office said Wednesday.

“In 2001, an estimated 89,000 children were living with HIV/AIDS,” said Vismita Gupta-Smith, public information and advocacy officer for WHO’s regional office in New Delhi, India. “In 2009, there are an estimated 130,000 children living with HIV infection,” including recent HIV infection, advanced HIV infection and AIDS.

The 11 countries in the region are Bangladesh, Bhutan, North Korea, India, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Timor-Liste.

But a report by a United Nations program released last month shows some encouraging news, including drops in AIDS-related deaths and new HIV cases.