July 2016

July 27th, 2016 The 21st International AIDS Conference came to a close this past Friday with over 18 000 delegates attending from around the world. The conference included panel discussions, poster presentations, exhibitions,

July 21st, 2016 Today, July 21 2016, the International AIDS Conference held in Durban, South Africa convened the fourth day of its conference. One session of note was known as "Treatment Evolution: New Drugs, New Reality." Speakers included Drs Jean-Michel Molina, Dr. Alejandro Arenas-Pinto, Dr. Michael Aboud, Dr. Deanna Kerrigan, Dr. Catherine Orell, and Dr. David Margolis. The talk focused on how AIDS treatment regimens needed to be adapted as new drugs have been released...

July 22nd, 2016 In 2014, UNAIDS rolled out the ambitious 90-90-90 target for 2020 in which "90% of all people living with HIV will know their HIV status, 90% of all people with diagnosed HIV infection will receive sustained antiretroviral therapy and 90% of all people receiving antiretroviral therapy will have viral suppression". But how economically feasible is this goal?

July 19th, 2016 The 21st International Conference kicked off yesterday in Durban, South Africa with nearly 20 000 delegates attending from across the globe. On Tuesday July 19th, the conference held a vaccine symposium that addressed the latest research and progress on HIV vaccines and antibody prophalixis trials in southern Africa. The session was led by medical virologist at the University of Cape Town, Wendy Anne Burgers, and...

July 19th, 2016 Today, July 19 2016, the International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2016) kicked off its second day in Durban, South Africe. Today, a press conference held on the topic of finding an HIV cure was held. The press conference was chaired by Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine winner. Barré-Sinoussi received the award for the discovery of HIV decades prior. Other speakers at the press conference were Dr. Sharon Lewin, Dr. Annemarie Wensing, Dr. Giorgio Bozzi, Dr. Ann...

July 8th, 2016 Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) continues to be the most common hospital-acquired disease in the United Sates, with over 450 000 infections annually. In the recent 12 July 2016 edition of Cell, researchers from the University of Virginia have discovered a possible immune-based therapy for this disease. Although IL-25 is typically studied in the context of allergies, it has shown...

July 7th, 2016 IInjection drug users (IDUs) are at a greater risk of contracting co-morbidities like HIV, hepatitis, and other blood-contracted diseases. However, it’s possible that the act of injection drug use itself may be altering the immune profile of IDUs, which may make them more susceptible to these infections. New research from Pipenbrink et al. uses a flow cytometry approach to determine whether the immune profiles of IDUs....

July 5th, 2016 New research published in PLOS One attempted to bridge the gap between the social and the biological by studying the relationship between loneliness and circulating levels of fibrinogen and C-reactive protein (CRP). To do so, they asked their research population of healthy, middle-aged adults to self-report levels of loneliness, and measured the circulating levels of fibrinogen and CRP.....