70,000 children infected by HIV in India

An estimated 70,000 children are infected with HIV in the country and the ailment is caused to most of them by parent-to-child-transmission (PTCT), according to a recent finding by the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO).

Participants of a UNICEF-state AIDS Prevention and Control Society seminar in Kolkata said, quoting NACO estimates, that a small proportion of these children are infected by unsafe injections and blood transfusions.

"UNICEF supports the government in its effort to halt and reverse the HIV/AIDS outbreak in India to reduce the transmission of HIV from infected mothers to their children," the country chief of UNICEF, HIV and AIDS, Ivonne Camaroni told on the sidelines of the seminar on Thursday.

With 21,000 children infected every year through PTCT, the UNICEF wanted to provide strategic supplies of drugs and commodities, improve the capacity of staff by developing innovative communication approaches for prevention and care and helping to improve monitoring and reporting systems.

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Profectus BioSciences starts HIV vaccine study

Profectus BioSciences Inc. is launching the first phase of an HIV vaccine study alongside an international panel of scientists researching the disease.

The study is testing 60 HIV-negative adults using a “recombinant” version of the virus that has been weakened so it doesn’t cause illness in animals or humans. It will look at the safety and effectiveness of increasing doses of a vaccine that contains a protein designed to block the virus from infecting humans.

Baltimore-based Profectus is working with the HIV Vaccine Trials Network on the study, which is also being sponsored by the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.



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HIV may be risk factor in heart failure

"Heavy alcohol consumption, which is more prevalent among HIV-infected people, is also an established risk factor for heart failure," the study authors write.

Adeel A. Butt from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and colleagues analyzed data from HIV-infected and HIV-uninfected veterans enrolled in the Veterans Aging Cohort Study Virtual Cohort, the journal Archives of Internal Medicine reports.

The objective was to determine whether HIV infection was independently associated with an increase risk of heart failure (HF), according to a Pittsburgh statement.

A total of 8,486 patients were included in the analysis, of whom 2,391 were HIV- infected and 6,095 were HIV-uninfected. During the median (midpoint) 7.3 years of follow-up, there were 286 new heart failure events and 1,096 deaths.

"Participants with HIV infection were more likely to have Hepatitis C virus co-infection and cocaine abuse or dependence and higher reported rate of current smoking, but were less likely to have hypertension or diabetes," the authors report.

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