#aids and hiv

[im-enoch]

Shoutout to all my friends with STDs, you aren't "dirty" or "damaged", unfuckable or unloveable, you are valuable and super hot!!!!

[pandemic-info]

Referred to as "the Dusseldorf patient" to protect his privacy, researchers said he is the fifth confirmed case of an HIV cure. Although the details of his successful treatment were first announced at a conference in 2019, researchers could not confirm he had been officially cured at that time.

Today, researchers announced the Dusseldorf patient still has no detectable virus in his body, even after stopping his HIV medication four years ago.

[politijohn]

Source

This entire article is worth the read. Fuck Gilead

[ninecolors]

HIV: THE OTHER CLOSET

Imagine an unknown virus is spreading at incredible speed, causing a global pandemic that kills millions everywhere.

And now imagine that nobody cares. Nobody does anything about it. Nobody even talks about what's happening. Even worse, in many places the research into this lethal virus and possible ways to stop it are actively obstructed.

That's how the AIDS pandemic was for several decades.

World AIDS Day, held on 1 December every year since 1988, is an international day dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV.

In the 40 years since the first cases of AIDS were discovered, enormous strides have been made in our knowledge of HIV and how to manage it, but there is still a great deal of work yet do be done to end the pandemic that never went away.

Thanks to the efforts of activists, scientists, and educators around the world, today a diagnosis is not necessarily a death sentence. Progress continues at an ever-accelerating pace, reaching milestones that were unthinkable only a few years ago:

U = U

With the treatments now available, a person living with HIV can have a totally normal life, including not being contagious. Yes, you read that right. When a person living with HIV receives adequate treatment, the virus is suppressed to the point that is no longer detectable in their blood: they become undetectable.

Undetectable means untransmissible. In other words, that person is not able to pass the virus to others.

PrEP and PEP

Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) and Post-Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP) are two kinds of medication that are highly effective in preventing the transmission of HIV. They have been made available recently, and their implementation is still limited, but these drugs are already playing a critical role in reducing transmission rates among at-risk populations.

HIV Vaccine

We have never been closer to an effective and long-lasting vaccine against HIV. Thousands of researchers and volunteers around the globe are working tirelessly to develop one. Currently the Mosaico Study is the most promising candidate.

VIHsibility

The visibility of HIV/AIDS characters in media has come a long way, both in quantity and quality. These representations are important because they have real-world impact in people's perceptions and behaviors. For example, after the success of the British show "It's a Sin", there was a significant increase in HIV testing in the UK.

[queersatanic]

Happy birthday, Duane.

[shamebats]

"Keep dancing! Joy is resistance."

[allthegeopolitics]

Fewer people contracted HIV last year than at any point since the rise of the disease in the late 1980s, the United Nations said Tuesday, warning that this decline was still far too slow. Around 1.3 million people contracted the disease in 2023, according to the new report from the UNAIDS agency. That is still more than three times higher than needed to reach the UN's goal of ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. Around 630,000 people died from AIDS-related illnesses last year, the lowest level since a peak of 2.1 million in 2004, the report said ahead of World AIDS Day on Sunday.

Continue Reading.

[bobwess]

HIV used to be a death sentence, and a fast one. Modern medication has done wonders to bringing people's life expectancy back to normal, decreasing transmission rates and risks, and even in a handful of cases completely curing the virus. There is some good news out there.

[reasonsforhope]

"A large clinical trial in South Africa and Uganda has shown that a twice-yearly injection of a new pre-exposure prophylaxis drug gives young women total protection from HIV infection.

The trial tested whether the six-month injection of lenacapavir would provide better protection against HIV infection than two other drugs, both daily pills. All three medications are pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP) drugs.

Physician-scientist Linda-Gail Bekker, principal investigator for the South African part of the study, tells Nadine Dreyer what makes this breakthough so significant and what to expect next.

Tell us about the trial and what it set out to achieve

The Purpose 1 trial with 5,000 participants took place at three sites in Uganda and 25 sites in South Africa to test the efficacy of lenacapavir and two other drugs.

Lenacapavir (Len LA) is a fusion capside inhibitor. It interferes with the HIV capsid, a protein shell that protects HIV’s genetic material and enzymes needed for replication. It is administered just under the skin, once every six months.

The randomised controlled trial, sponsored by the drug developers Gilead Sciences, tested several things.

The first was whether a six-monthly injection of lenacapavir was safe and would provide better protection against HIV infection as PrEP for women between the ages of 16 and 25 years than Truvada F/TDF, a daily PrEP pill in wide use that has been available for more than a decade.

Secondly, the trial also tested whether Descovy F/TAF, a newer daily pill, was as effective as F/TDF...

The trial had three arms. Young women were randomly assigned to one of the arms in a 2:2:1 ratio (Len LA: F/TAF oral: F/TDF oral) in a double blinded fashion. This means neither the participants nor the researchers knew which treatment participants were receiving until the clinical trial was over.

In eastern and southern Africa, young women are the population who bear the brunt of new HIV infections. They also find a daily PrEP regimen challenging to maintain, for a number of social and structural reasons.

During the randomised phase of the trial none of the 2,134 women who received lenacapavir contracted HIV. There was 100 percent efficiency.

By comparison, 16 of the 1,068 women (or 1.5%) who took Truvada (F/TDF) and 39 of 2,136 (1.8%) who received Descovy (F/TAF) contracted the HIV virus...

What is the significance of these trials?

This breakthrough gives great hope that we have a proven, highly effective prevention tool to protect people from HIV.

There were 1.3 million new HIV infections globally in the past year. Although that’s fewer than the 2 million infections seen in 2010, it is clear that at this rate we are not going to meet the HIV new infection target that UNAIDS set for 2025 (fewer than 500,000 globally) or potentially even the goal to end Aids by 2030...

For young people, the daily decision to take a pill or use a condom or take a pill at the time of sexual intercourse can be very challenging.

HIV scientists and activists hope that young people may find that having to make this “prevention decision” only twice a year may reduce unpredictability and barriers.

For a young woman who struggles to get to an appointment at a clinic in a town or who can’t keep pills without facing stigma or violence, an injection just twice a year is the option that could keep her free of HIV.

What happens now?

The plan is that the Purpose 1 trial will go on but now in an “open label” phase. This means that study participants will be “unblinded”: they will be told whether they have been in the “injectable” or oral TDF or oral TAF groups.

They will be offered the choice of PrEP they would prefer as the trial continues.

A sister trial is also under way: Purpose 2 is being conducted in a number of regions including some sites in Africa among cisgender men, and transgender and nonbinary people who have sex with men.

It’s important to conduct trials among different groups because we have seen differences in effectiveness. Whether the sex is anal or vaginal is important and may have an impact on effectiveness.

How long until the drug is rolled out?

We have read in a Gilead Sciences press statement that within the next couple of months [from July 2024] the company will submit the dossier with all the results to a number of country regulators, particularly the Ugandan and South African regulators.

The World Health Organization will also review the data and may issue recommendations.

We hope then that this new drug will be adopted into WHO and country guidelines.

We also hope we may begin to see the drug being tested in more studies to understand better how to incorporate it into real world settings.

Price is a critical factor to ensure access and distribution in the public sector where it is badly needed.

Gilead Sciences has said it will offer licences to companies that make generic drugs, which is another critical way to get prices down.

In an ideal world, governments will be able to purchase this affordably and it will be offered to all who want it and need protection against HIV."

-via The Conversation, July 3, 2024

[oneinchbarrier]

[worldspotlightnews]

The US helped prevent AIDS from being a death sentence in Africa. Now the epidemic is at a crossroads | CNN

Tembisa, South Africa CNN  —  Fourteen-year-old Philasande Dayimani carries a burden that no child should carry. Last year, she started getting sores in her mouth and struggled to breathe. She says a clinic doctor told her to test for HIV. “It wasn’t easy for me to accept. Many people cry when they hear about their status. I also cried,” she says, seated in her small shack in Tembisa, an…

[our-queer-experience]

bro…

[nerdybitch]

Ray Monde and Aids

Inspired by someone mentioning Ray in my general vicinity on accident, legit when I finally got to his chapter I was rambling to my friend about how this was such a surprisingly well written gay character given the time period he was introduced (the late 80s), especially one with Aids/HIV, in an era where many people were still scared of that kind of thing, It wasn't until the year before the comic was released in 1987 that Princess Diana shook hands with Aid's patients which was such a giant thing back in the day because many people believed Aids was a dirty disease that you could catch from merely shaking someone's hand or being around them. Yet when Ray tells John he has Aids...

Idk this just made my cold dead little heart MELT when I saw it, how John comforted Ray with a hand on his shoulder and didn't say a word. Idk it made me kicks my feet, I really wish we saw more of Ray, even if it was as a ghost like the rest of John's buds, but given Ray only showed up once as a ghost and it was literally to be a guardian angel for John and talk him out of stupid shit his ass is probably up in Heaven with Brendan.

[queerasfact]

Condoman

In 1987, Indigenous sexual health worker Aunty Gracelyn Smallwood and her team felt that safe sex advertising wasn’t effectively targeting people in Australia’s remote Indigenous communities. In response, they created Condoman - “The Deadly Predator of Sexual Health” - who spoke to Indigenous people in language they could relate to, and removed stigma from conversations about sexual health. 

Condoman became something of a cult figure in Australia, and in 2009 he was relaunched with a suite of comics, animations, and merch, including branded condoms. He was also joined by his “deadly, slippery sister” Lubelicious, who promoted consent, the use of water based lube, and women’s health, for her sisters and sistergirls (an Indigenous term analogous to trans women).

We covered Condoman in our podcast on the AIDS epidemic in Australia.

Keep an eye on this blog throughout the week as we continue highlighting queer Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and culture for NAIDOC Week.

[politijohn]

Source

[icemav86]

1980s/1990s safe sex posters part 2

[part 1]