#HIV Care

[politijohn]

Source

This entire article is worth the read. Fuck Gilead

[gpstudios]

Title: Observing National HIV/AIDS and Aging Awareness Day: Highlighting the Intersection of HIV/AIDS and Aging

Introduction National HIV/AIDS and Aging Awareness Day, observed annually on September 18, focuses on the unique challenges faced by older adults living with HIV/AIDS. As the population of people living with HIV/AIDS ages, it is crucial to address the specific health needs and barriers they encounter. This day raises awareness about the intersection of HIV/AIDS and aging, promotes better…

[emed123]

HIV/AIDs Research and Treatment Breakthroughs

Explore the latest breakthroughs in HIV/AIDS research and treatment, that have the potential to reshape the landscape of HIV/AIDS management.

[commiepinkofag]

Dr. Gao Yaojie: Dissident doctor who exposed China's AIDS epidemic, dies at 95

Her work uncovered how businesses selling blood led to the spread of HIV in the countryside.

She was at the forefront of AIDS activism in China and traveled across the country treating patients, often at her own expense.

A gynecologist by training, she encountered her first AIDS patient in the central province of Henan in 1996.

While she was not the first Chinese doctor to expose the AIDS epidemic, it was her efforts that made the situation known to the country and beyond.

She told the Associated Press in a previous interview that she withstood government pressure and persisted in her work because “everyone has the responsibility to help their own people. As a doctor, that’s my job. So it’s worth it.”

[liberaljane]

Zero stigma, Zero AIDS-related Deaths & Zero New HIV Infections.

Created with Getting to Zero Massachusetts

Digital illustration of a group of people of different ages, races, sexualities, genders and abilities. In the center is a Black woman holding a sign that reads, 'together we can end the HIV epidemic.'

[sophsun1]

Queer As Folk – 1.02: Queer, There and Everywhere

[reasonsforhope]

"The “Düsseldorf Patient”, a man now aged 53, is just the third person worldwide to have been completely cured of HIV via stem cell transplantation.

As in the case of the other two patients, the so-called “Berlin Patient” and “London Patient,” the transplantation was undertaken to treat an acute blood disease, which had developed in addition to the HIV infection.

The Düsseldorf Patient received a stem cell transplant used to treat leukemia in 2013 and has shown persistent suppression of HIV-1 ever since, including during the last 4 years after the patient stopped taking anti-retroviral medication.

“I still remember very well the sentence from my family doctor: ‘don’t take it so hard,'” the Düsseldorf Patient, who had leukemia as well as HIV-1, said in a statement. “‘We will experience together that HIV can be cured!’ At the time, I dismissed the statement.”

Allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is a procedure used to treat certain cancers, such as leukemia, by transferring immature blood cells from a donor to repopulate the bone marrow of the recipient.

Scientists now understand that individuals with two copies of the Δ32 mutation in the gene for the HIV-1 co-receptor CCR5; are resistant to HIV-1 infection. The two previous cases of both the London patient and the Berlin patient involved receiving a stem cell transplant from a donor with these unique mutations.

Björn-Erik Jensen, a specialist in infectious diseases at Düsseldorf University Hospital, lead the treatment and subsequent research, revealed today in a peer-reviewed study in Nature.

The patient was diagnosed as having acute myeloid leukemia and proceeded to undergo transplantation of stem cells from a female donor in 2013, followed by chemotherapy and infusions of donor lymphocytes.

After the transplantation, anti-retroviral therapy was continued, but HIV was undetectable in the patient’s blood cells. Anti-retroviral therapy was suspended in November 2018 with the patient’s informed consent, almost 6 years after the stem cell transplantation, to determine whether the virus persisted in the patient.

“I very much hope that these doctors will now get even more attention for their work,” said the patient. “I have now decided to give up some of my private life to support research fundraising. And of course, it will also stay very important for me to fight the stigmatization of HIV with my story.”

The authors conclude that although HSCT remains a high-risk procedure that is at present an option only for some people living with both HIV-1 and hematological cancers, these results may inform future strategies for achieving long-term remission of HIV-1."

-via Good News Network, 2/20/23

VERIFIED 10 YEARS ON, PROOF THAT HIV IS CURABLE

[ss-dolphin]

I’m on the last page of my essay and it’s barely noon omg. It also helps that I don’t feel like it’s total shit from the butt

[stuffnonsenseandotherthings]

LITBC part 3 discussions should be coming up soon (very excited to finally get to take part!) and I know I'm early but the first thing that came to mind with Young's diagnosis is how HIV is a very very poorly understood and deeply stigmatised disease in Korea, even among the queer community, and how truly shocking and appalling the treatment of people with HIV is in a country with access to some of the best health care in the world.

https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/2017/june/20170622_korea

https://web.stanford.edu/group/sjph/cgi-bin/sjphsite/hivaids-in-south-korea-a-societal-stigma/

https://thediplomat.com/2017/06/in-south-korea-being-hiv-positive-might-prevent-you-from-accessing-healthcare/

[queerism1969]

[politijohn]

Source

[theatre-gay-they]

Hamilton was great, I have a lot to say, both artistically and politically, but I think there's something more important.

Blaine Alden Krauss joked that those in the front could afford to give $1000. I wasn't in the front, but hopefully I can. The work you do is so important, perhaps especially now. When I got off the BART at UN plaza I couldn't help notice the difference between the Orpheum theatre and the city around it, and I promised to spend at least as much as I spent on my ticket on something worthwhile. I hope I can really make a difference in someone's life. Thank you, Broadway Cares / Equity Fights AIDS.

Now you obviously don't have to donate to any given charity, and you definitely don't have to donate a grand, but if you can spare something, maybe remember there's people who can't. Receipt attached for proof

[freckledsweetpea]

btw if you come on my blog to compare types of queerness in bad faith I'm blocking you. I don't care what you have to say at all and respect is gone. You are quite literally sowing division of community and doing THE EXACT SAME THING THAT THE LGB PEOPLE DO. Of COURSE different individuals will always have it worse than others. YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE WILL ALWAYS FEEL WORSE THAN OTHERS AND TO FIGHT TO MAKE IT SO YOUR LABEL IS SEEN AS THE WORST CASE SCENARIO IS ACTUALLY STUPID.

[jcmarchi]

A home away from a homeland

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/a-home-away-from-a-homeland/

A home away from a homeland

When the Haitian Multi-Service Center opened in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston in 1978, it quickly became a valued resource. Haitian immigrants likened it to Ellis Island, Plymouth Rock, and Haiti’s own Citadel, a prominent fort. The center, originally located in an old Victorian convent house in St. Leo Parish, provided health care, adult education, counseling, immigration and employment services, and more.

Such services require substantial funding. Before long, Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Francis Law merged the Haitian Multi-Service Center into the Greater Boston Catholic Charities network, whose deeper pockets kept the center intact. Law required that Catholic welfare promote the church’s doctrine. Catholic HIV/AIDS prevention programs started emphasizing only abstinence, not contraception. Meanwhile, the center also received state and federal funding that required grantees to promote medical “best practices” that contrasted with church doctrines.

In short, even while the center served as a community beacon, there were tensions around its funding and function — which in turn reflect bigger tensions about our civic fabric.

“These conflicts are about what the role of government is and where the line is, if there is a line, between public and private, and who ultimately is responsible for the health and well-being of individuals, families, and larger populations,” says MIT scholar Erica Caple James, who has long studied nongovernmental programs.

Now James has written a new book on the subject, “Life at the Center: Haitians and Corporate Catholicism in Boston,” published this spring by the University of California Press and offering a meticulous study of the Haitian Multi-Service Center that illuminates several issues at once.

In it, James, the Professor of Medical Anthropology and Urban Studies in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, carefully examines the relationship between the Haitian community, the Catholic Church, and the state, analyzing how the church’s “pastoral power” is exercised and to whose benefit. The book also chronicles the work of the center’s staff, revealing how everyday actions are connected to big-picture matters of power and values. And the book explores larger questions about community, belonging, and finding meaning in work and life — things not unique to Boston’s Haitian Americans but made visible in this study.

Who makes the rules?

Trained as a psychiatric anthropologist, James has studied Haiti since the 1990s; her 2010 book “Democratic Insecurities” examined post-trauma aid programs in Haiti. James was asked to join the Haitian Multi-Service Center’s board in 2005, and served until 2010. She developed the new book as a study of a community in which she was participating.

Over several decades, Boston’s Haitian American population has become one of the city’s most significant immigrant communities. Haitians fleeing violence and insecurity often gained a foothold in the city, especially in the Dorchester and Mattapan neighborhoods as well as some suburbs. The Haitian Multi-Service Center became integral to the lives of many people trying to gain stability and prosperity. And, from residential clergy to those in need of emergency shelter, people were always at the site.

As James writes, the center “literally was a home for many stakeholders, and for others, a home away from a homeland left behind.”

Church support for the center worked partly because many Haitians felt aligned with the church, attending services and Catholic schools; in turn the church provided uniquely substantial support for the Haitian American community.

That also meant some high-profile issues were resolved according to church doctrine. For example, the center’s education efforts about HIV/AIDS transmission did not include contraception, due to the church’s emphasis on abstinence — which many workers considered less effective. Some staff members would even step outside the center to distribute condoms to community members, thus not violating policy.

“We started as a grassroots organization. … Now we have a church making decisions for the community,” said the former director of the center’s HIV/AIDS prevention programming. By 1996, the center’s adult literacy staff resigned en masse over policy differences, with some workers asserting in a 1996 memo that the church “has assumed a proprietary role over our work in the Haitian community.”

Coalition, not consensus

Another policy tension surrounding Catholic charities emerged after same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts in 2004. In 2005, a reporter revealed that over the previous 18 years the church had facilitated 13 adoptions of difficult-to-place children with gay couples in the state. After this practice became publicized, the church announced in 2006 that its century of adoption work would end, so as to not violate either church or state laws.

Ultimately, James says, “There are structural dimensions that were baked in, which almost inevitably produced tensions at the institutional or organizational level.”

And yet, as James chronicles attentively, there was hardly consensus about the church’s role in the center. The center’s Haitian American community members were a coalition, not a bloc; some welcomed the church’s presence at the center for spiritual or practical reasons, or both.

“Many Haitians felt there was value from [the center] being independent, but there are others who felt it would be difficult to maintain otherwise,” James says.

Some of the community members even expressed lingering respect for Boston’s Cardinal Law, a central figure of the Catholic Church abuse scandal that emerged in 2002; Law had personally championed the charitable work the church had been performing for Haitians in Boston. In this light, another question emerging from the book, James says, is, “What encourages people to remain loyal to an imperfect institution?”

Keepers of the flame

Some of the people most loyal to the Haitian Multi-Service Center were its staff, whose work James carefully details. Some staff had themselves previously benefitted from the center’s services. The institution’s loyal workers, James writes, served as “keepers of the flame,” understanding its history, building community connections, and extending their own identities through good works for others.

For these kinds of institutions, James notes, “They seem most successful when there is transparency, solidarity, a strong sense of purpose. … It [shows] why we do our jobs and what we do to find meaning.”

“Life at the Center” has generated positive feedback from other scholars. As Linda Barnes, a professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, has stated, “One could read ‘Life at the Center’ multiple times and, with each reading, encounter new dimensions. Erica Caple James’s work is exceptional.”

What of the Haitian Multi-Service Center today? In 2006, it was moved and is now housed in Catholic Charities’ Yawkey Center, along with other entities. Some of the workers and community members, James notes in the book, consider the center to have died over the years, compared to its stand-alone self. Others simply consider it transformed. Many have strong feelings, one way or another, about the place that helped orient them as they forged new lives.

As James writes, “It has been difficult to reconcile the intense emotions shared by many of the Center’s stakeholders — confusion, anger, disbelief, and frustration, still expressed with intensity even decades later — alongside reminiscences of love, joy, laughter, and care in rendering service to Haitians and others in need.”

As “Life at the Center” makes clear, that intensity stems from the shared mission many people had, of finding their way in a new and unfamiliar country, in the company of others. And as James writes, in concluding the book, “fulfillment of a mission is never solely about single acts of individuals, but rather the communal striving toward aiding, educating, empowering, and instilling hope in others.”

[artebar]

Three Months (2022) dir. Jared Frieder

"- No quiero vivir con algo que haga que todos me dejen. - Yo no te dejaré".

Un joven gay en los suburbios de Florida cuyos planes para después de la escuela secundaria se vuelven inciertos después de enterarse de que estuvo expuesto al VIH durante una aventura de una noche. El título de la película hace referencia al tiempo que tarda el torrente sanguíneo humano en acumular suficientes anticuerpos para dar positivo en la prueba del VIH después de la transmisión.