Featured series 
Tag: AIDS and HIV
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Health
One combination of AIDS drugs appears better for starting treatment
Combination drug therapy – also called highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) – made a huge difference in the treatment of HIV infection during the 1990s, changing HIV/AIDS into an illness that people could live with for many years. Combinations of three antiviral drugs could keep the virus in check for a while, and when one…
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Health
Strategies to help AIDS patients take medicines are cost effective
The effectiveness of antiretroviral therapy for HIV infection depends on how well patients adhere to complicated drug regimens. Researchers found that among patients with lower levels of adherence to their medication regimen, even very expensive, moderately effective adherence interventions are likely to offer cost-effective benefits that compare favorably with other interventions in HIV disease. The…
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Health
AIDS vaccine trials underway
A new AIDS vaccine is being tested in Boston, according to senior investigator Clyde Crumpacker, infectious disease specialist in the Virology Research Clinic at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School’s Division of AIDS. The study, which will include a total of 160 participants at 10 sites throughout…
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Health
HIV-1 positive mothers taking vitamin A increase risk of transmitting HIV to newborns
In many regions of Africa, between 15 and 30 percent of women attending prenatal care clinics are HIV-1 positive. And 20 to 45 percent of children born to HIV-1 positive mothers become infected through breastfeeding or during intrauterine or labor and delivery periods. Mother-to-child transmission of HIV-1 has been attributed in part to poor maternal…
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Health
Statistical work helps calm worries about anti-AIDS drugs and pregnancy
For years, physicians have prescribed antiretroviral therapies for HIV-positive, pregnant women to reduce the risk of babies being born with the AIDS virus. About 6,000 HIV-infected women give birth each year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Concerns about the effects of anti-AIDS drugs and premature births were raised by…
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Science & Tech
RNA technology thwarts HIV
RNA interference (RNAi) is a naturally occurring phenomenon by which cells guard themselves against viruses. The process involves post-transcriptional gene silencing in which specific RNA sequences get chopped into small pieces after binding to complementary short interfering RNAs (siRNA). These siRNAs can target either host mRNAs or viral genomic or messenger RNAs. As a consequence,…
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Science & Tech
Kennedy School students help Kenyans battle AIDS
Two Kennedy School master’s students, Shanti Nayak and Nazanin Samari-Kermani, went to Kenya to help a leading anti-poverty organization investigate how best to fight AIDS. Their research, with ActionAid-Kenya, a United Kingdom-based organization, identified a variety of reforms that should help ActionAid more efficiently battle the disease, which kills 700 people a day in the…
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Science & Tech
Patents have negative impact on access to HIV/AIDS drugs in developing countries
Researchers Joan-Ramon Borrell and Jayashree Watal collected sales data for HIV/AIDS drugs in a sample of 34 low- and middle-income countries between 1995 and 1999 to assess the impact of patents on unsubsidized access to a new drug therapy. Their main finding is that patent rights do have a negative effect on unsubsidized access to…
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Health
Biostatisticians crunch data vital to AIDS research, genetics
Broadly defined, statistical genetics is the development of methods to analyze DNA. In recent years, the term has been more specifically applied to gene mapping, or the search for locations of genes related to diseases, and to the analysis of drug therapies. Statistical genetics plays a significant role in what some experts predict to be…
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Health
Trying to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV
Harvard AIDS Institute researchers in Botswana are trying to help HIV-infected mothers and their infants. In the rural area of Molepolole, where AIDS Institute researcher Shahin Lockman lives and works, about two thirds of pregnant women consent to HIV testing. Lockman says that a little more than half of HIV-infected women choose to participate in…
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Health
HIV-1 infected children benefit greatly from combination therapy
Combination therapy including protease inhibitors has been available since 1996 for adults with HIV-1 infection. The therapy has slowed the progression of HIV-1 and drastically reduced the rate of mortality in adults. But how does the combination therapy work in children with HIV-1 infection? In the first prospective study in the United States to look…
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Science & Tech
Drug patents not crucial in AIDS fight, researchers find
About 25 million people are infected with AIDS in Africa and just 25,000, or one in 1,000, are receiving antiretroviral drug treatment. Patents for anti-AIDS drugs have come under fire repeatedly in recent years, with activists charging that the patents keep drug prices high and block manufacture of cheaper generic alternatives that could save lives.…
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Science & Tech
Medicaid coverage for anti-AIDS drugs would be cost effective
It’s long been said that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” A new study from the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis applies the principle to treating HIV-infected people with antiretroviral drugs, the so-called “AIDS cocktail.” Under Medicare rules, people without health insurance can’t get treatment until they develop full-blown AIDS and…
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Science & Tech
Harvard faculty press aggressive agenda for AIDS fight in Africa
A statement signed by more than 100 Harvard faculty members calls upon wealthy countries, in partnership with poor countries, to establish a global trust fund to make life-prolonging antiretroviral therapy available in the areas of the world hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic. The statement is the first of its kind to outline a comprehensive…
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Health
Testing to identify drug-resistant AIDS strains is cost-effective
A new study led by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in March 2001, finds that testing people with HIV to determine whether they have a drug-resistant strain of the virus is a cost-effective use of resources in the battle against HIV. In fact, the study finds that…
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Health
T-cell response to HIV proteins may make them vaccine candidates
Development of a vaccine against HIV-1 has long focused on the virus’s structural proteins. These molecules are expressed relatively late in the viral life cycle, after HIV-1 has decreased the expression of an important set of cellular proteins involved in the body’s ability to fight viral infections. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical…
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Science & Tech
Researchers publish HIV study results despite efforts to block
Researchers refused to suppress publication of data that indicates an experimental drug did not slow the progression of HIV infection, even though the drug company that sponsored their research tried to block the publication in court. Stephen Lagakos, chair of the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a colleague from…
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Health
Shorter treatment as effective, less costly in preventing HIV in babies
Of the more than 1,500 infants who get HIV from their infected mothers every day, 95 percent live in developing countries where the poverty level is high. Many mothers in these regions do not have access to the three- to six-month AZT treatment, now considered the standard treatment to prevent perinatal HIV transmission in developed…