HIV may seem like an old problem by now, but it’s still very much relevant.
Worldwide, 33.4 million people are living with HIV, including 2.1 children younger than 15. Even high-income countries like the US haven’t made much progress on reducing new cases of HIV.
For North American and Western and Central Europe, the number of new HIV infections for 2008 was 75,000, compared with 93,000 new cases in 2001. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of new HIV infections for 2008 was 1.9 million, compared with 2.3 million in 2001. Sub-Saharan Africa continues to be the region most affected by HIV with …read more

People with HIV are living longer with the use of antiretroviral drugs, but some of that may come at a cost. Researchers have noticed that certain types of cancers, such as anal, lung, Hodgkin’s, melanoma or liver cancer are more common in this group. People with HIV have a 60% higher chance of developing these cancers than do people who don’t have HIV.
Researchers looked at 66,840 patients who had cancer and did not have HIV and 33,420 who had cancer and did have HIV. The types of cancers the researchers were looking for (anal, lung, liver, etc) were cancers that …read more

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 10% of the world’s population has some sort of disability. Disabilities, be they blindness or restricted physical movement, can interfere with access to healthcare and they can make a person more vulnerable to certain illnesses, such as HIV/AIDS, say WHO experts.
If you’d like to listen to a podcast about this topic, click on the radio to listen to Persons with disabilities particularly vulnerable to HIV/AIDS:

Image: Newscom.com

For many girls raised in relatively wealthy countries, it’s hard to understand what life can be like for girls who aren’t as fortunate. And sadly, there are girls like that around the world, those who are poor, who are hungry, who are orphaned – girls who have no-one to turn to.
The Kingdom of Lesotho is a small landlocked country (11,720 square miles), surrounded on all sides by South Africa. Lesotho is also one of the many countries that has been hard by HIV and AIDS.
According to AVERT, an international AIDS charity ,
Lesotho is a small country where 18,000 people died …read more

We don’t hear about the “old” STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) as much any more. Most of our focus is on HIV and HPV (human papillomavirus), which can lead to cervical cancer. But those older STDs are still out there. Just ask the 10 teens who were diagnosed over the past month in Oklahoma. All 10 are under 18 years old (Officials Confirm Teen Syphilis Outbreak).
Those kids were lucky. Why? Syphilis is curable. HIV isn’t. That doesn’t mean that syphilis is harmless – it’s not.
If the syphilis infection isn’t diagnosed in the early or middle stages, it may not be detectable …read more

When I was a teen (in the dark ages), the most women had to worry about if they were sexually active was getting pregnant or catching a treatable sexually transmitted disease (STD). Because of the pregnancy concern, the Pill was a major breakthrough for women, changing their lives.
Unfortunately, the world has changed significantly since the 70s. Now, sex without a barrier method of protection is like playing Russian Roulette. I don’t think we should even call barrier protection birth control. That’s a misnomer, in my mind. Those barriers are life-savers. They prevent the transmission of illnesses like HIV, which may …read more

HIV-positive men who are sexually active with other men are up to 90 times more likely to develop anal cancer than the general population.
Anal dysplasia or precancerous changes can be detected by anal cytology or the “anal canal pap smear”. This is a relatively new procedure and is not yet included in standard practice.
The UCLA CARE clinic is one of a few clinics in the United States offering an anal dysplasia screening and management service. Their new study demonstrated that abnormal anal cytology was highly predictive of anal cell abnormalities that were subsequently confirmed by anal biopsy.
Findings were reported in …read more