I Have HIV- Hope In Victory- Do you?

Tomorrow- December 1st, 2008- is World AIDS Day.

Lots of great events are going on around the twin cities. There are things happening all week, check out the Department of Health's site to find out more. Some of my favorites are:

Global Films on HIV/AIDS – St. Paul

Sponsored by Neighborhood House
Monday, December 1, 2008
4:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.
at
Paul and Sheila Wellstone Center for Community Building
179 Robie Street East
St. Paul, MN 55107

Mark your calendar for a series of film showings on the topic of HIV/AIDS on World AIDS Day, December 1st. Local organizations will have an opportunity to showcase some of their educational films/videos/DVDs that they use on HIV/AIDS. More details forthcoming. For more information, contact Sandy Agustin, Neighborhood House, (651) 789-2567, or by e-mail at: sagustin@neighb.org.

Our Wicked, Wicked Ways! – Minneapolis

Sponsored by the Minnesota AIDS Project
Monday, December 1, 2008
9:00 p.m.
at
The BOLT Underground
501 Washington Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55415

A one night only cabaret performance benefiting the Minnesota AIDS Project and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS will take place World AIDS Day. Don’t miss this 90-minute “wickedly entertaining” evening of songs performed by members of the Broadway National Touring Company of Wicked. The cast will also auction a number of items, including a special opportunity for a “walk on” during one of the remaining performances of the show. Tickets are $15.00 in advance or $20.00 at the door. Advance purchase at www.mnaidsproject.org or call the Wicked Hotline at (612) 373-2407.

Allan Spear Forum: Mark Senak – Attorney/Healthcare Policy Expert - Minneapolis

Sponsored by the Minnesota AIDS Project (MAP)
Monday, December 1, 2008
7:00 p.m.
at
University of Minnesota Law School
Lockhart Auditorium
229 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN

This forum is free and open to the public and will feature author Mark Senak who works at the international communications firm of Fleishman-Hillard. Senak brings extensive experience in HIV policy with 14 years combined service with AIDS Project Los Angeles and prior to that with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York, the two largest HIV service providers in the nation. While there, Senak worked on campaigns that included advocacy as well as public health, in encouraging people to be tested and treated for HIV, having to target multiple and varied audiences as well as dealing with legal issues surrounding the emergence of HIV. For more information, call MAP at (612) 373-9162 or visit MAP’s web site at: www.mnaidsproject.org.

About World AIDS Day-
It is estimated that 33 million people in the world are living with HIV/AIDS, at least two million of who are children.
25 million people have died from AIDS since 1981, 2 million of them last year.
In Africa alone, there are 11.6 million children orphaned by AIDS.

These numbers are huge and incredibly hard to process, I know. This is Blessing. She is one of the two million children living with HIV. We will only win this if we all work together. Come join the fight. Save a life.

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Big News on the HIV Front

"Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and colleagues in the United Kingdom have engineered T cells able to recognize HIV-1 strains that have evaded the immune system. The findings of the study, published online in the journal Nature Medicine, have important implications for developing new treatments for HIV, especially for patients with chronic infection who fail to respond to antiretroviral regimens." -Science Daily

A cure? No. Hope? Yeah, definitely.

You can check out the full story on Science Daily. You may have heard that in the last year testing for a potential HIV vaccine from Merck (who, for better or for worse, my brother acutally lobbies for) failed. In human trials the vaccine failed miserably, acutally making a subgroup of the subjects more vulnerable to HIV. Like many vaccines, Merck's vaccine, V520, used a few weakened human immunodeficiency viruses- none of which were strong enough to infect a person- delivered via a virus that usually causes the common cold. The idea behind this (and vaccines in general) is that once the body sees the human immunodeficiency virus it will be prepared to deal with it if someone is infect in the future. The problem, many researchers suspect, may have been in the use of the common cold virus to deliver the vaccine, which many people had already encountered in everyday life. In face of huge disappointment the trials were, rightly, stopped. And, until a few hours ago, that's about where the world stood on a HIV vaccine...

This new research does not prevent the acquisition of HIV, but drastically reduced the levels of the virus in monkeys and prevented the progression of HIV to AIDS. In case that is confusing- HIV, human immunodeficiency virus, is a virus, the infection. Once the virus is in your system, it slowly begins to kill off a person's T Cells, which are critical for a healthy immune system. With an immune system practically wiped out, HIV then turns into AIDS, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, which basically means your body is incredibly weak and starts being attacked by all sorts of opportunistic infections it would otherwise be able to fight off. This is a large part of the reason HIV is so dangerous, someone could be HIV+ for years and spreading the virus without knowing until they become sick as many as ten years later. Antiretroviral drugs are currently used to help keep the virus in check, but not everyone responds to antiretroviral drugs, and people often need to switch drugs as the lose their effectiveness. A new preventivie treatement (which this is not, but could help develop) triggering a natural immune response when an individual is exposed to HIV would have amazing implications.

This is, by no means, a cure of the end of the fight agains HIV. 2 million people still died of AIDS last year and there are currently over 11 million children orphaned by AIDS in Africa alone. But this is defiantely potentially very good news.

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