HIV and AIDS

HIV Tries To Escape Immune System
by eNotAlone.com
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS, is quickly adapting in order to escape the body's immune system, making it challenging for scientists to come up with a potential vaccine, new findings show.

Gene Theraphy Success For HIV Patients
by eNotAlone.com
The first clinical trial of gene therapy in patients infected with HIV has produced promising results, according to scientists who reported that the largest experiment appeared to safely and beneficially increase the number of immune system cells normally

HIV and AIDS Among Minorities, Women: Prevention Important, Treatment Imperative
by National Institute of Health
No matter who you are or where you live, there are three things you should know about Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), according to Dr. Victoria Cargill of the Office of AIDS Research at the National Institutes of Health.

Learn the AIDS Link: Drugs Can Give You More Than a High
by National Institute of Health
Most people know that drug abuse is linked to AIDS. Less understood is why they're linked. The 'high' that people get from drugs may alter their judgment and lead them to take risks they normally would not take - including having unprotected sex.

HIV, AIDS, and Older People
by National Institute on Aging
Like most people, you probably have heard a lot about HIV and AIDS. You may have thought that these diseases weren't your problem and that only younger people have to worry about them. But anyone at any age can get HIV/AIDS.

Treating HIV / AIDS, Minimizing Your Risk
by Health Canada
HIV stands for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. This is the virus that leads to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). HIV cannot survive outside of the body. In order to be infected, the virus must enter your bloodstream.

Living With AIDS : Reality Check
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Like Eppich, AIDS patients, today, can plan for their futures. But the optimism brought by the new drugs of the 1990s has dimmed as doctors and their patients have realized that the virus won't be vanquished so easily.

Living With AIDS: Combination Cocktails
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Despite their complex workings and complicated names, AIDS drugs are based on a relatively straightforward concept. By stopping or retarding the duplication of HIV inside the body's cells, the virus is prevented from overwhelming the immune system

Living With AIDS: Understanding and Battling the Virus
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
As the AIDS epidemic enters its third decade, the battle worldwide is focused on prevention, more effective treatments, improving the quality of life for people infected with HIV, and development of a vaccine.

AIDS Drug Approvals, What Is AIDS?
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Though the AIDS death rate has dropped drastically, and educational efforts aimed at curbing the number of new HIV infections have had a small impact, experts say the next hurdles are to develop an AIDS-preventive vaccine and to create new therapies

AIDS-Related Illnesses, Pregnant Women and Children
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Because AIDS patients have suppressed immune systems, they can fall prey to certain illnesses that people with healthy immune responses don't get, or get only very rarely. One common such illness is Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP)

AIDS Therapy: Drug Combo Sends Deaths Plummeting
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Though AIDS still strikes about 40,000 yearly in this country, a 'cocktail' of three drugs has drastically curbed the disease's death rate. Many health experts, in fact, credit the powerful HAART therapy with helping the domestic AIDS death rate to drop

Methods to Prevent and Treat AIDS: Drugs, Nutrition
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
In December 1995, a new class of drugs called protease inhibitors was added to the earlier approved class of nucleoside analogs, which included Retrovir (zidovudine, also known as AZT), Videx (didanosine, or ddI), Hivid (zalcitabine, or ddC), Zerit

Methods to Prevent and Treat AIDS: Blood Transfusion, Transplants
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
To protect patients and health-care providers against exposure to potentially contaminated blood and other body liquids, FDA established quality standards for latex and synthetic rubber gloves used during surgery and patient examination.

Methods to Prevent and Treat AIDS: HIV Tests, Condoms
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Home-use blood collection kits, lab tests that don't require blood, and new drugs are just a few of the new ways of diagnosing and treating HIV infection.

AIDS in Minority Communities : Response to the Epidemic
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Numerous private, corporate, community, state, and federal agencies are trying to help stem the tide of HIV among minorities and assist and support outreach and education programs. Federal agencies, in particular can sustain broad prevention, research

AIDS in Minority Communities : Barriers to Treatment
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
For minorities, discrimination, poverty, and inadequate health care and education are barriers to meaningful prevention messages and to treatment. And often, so are traditional beliefs. Homophobia and the belief that AIDS is a gay, white man's disease

AIDS in Minority Communities
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Rapid increases in HIV infection are occurring among minorities, particularly in low-income urban African American and Hispanic communities. The problem is often compounded by lack of access to health care, cultural barriers to condom use, and denial.

Women and AIDS : Drug Use, Mother and Child - The HIV Connection
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Any illegal drug use puts a person at risk for HIV. An HIV-infected person who uses injection drugs and shares needles can pass the virus to someone else through tiny amounts of blood that remain in the needle or syringe.

Women and AIDS : Prevention, Safer Sex
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Similarly, PID, syphilis, gonorrhea, and genital warts may be harder to treat in HIV-infected women. PID, which normally produces fever and pain, may go unnoticed in an HIV-infected woman because her body hasn't been able to mount the immune response