An AIDS Free Generation: Is it possible

President Barack Obama included AIDS in his first State of the Union speech after his re-election:

“.... the United States will join with our allies to eradicate such extreme poverty in the next two decades by.... saving the world’s children from preventable deaths; and by realizing the promise of an AIDS-free generation, which is within our reach.”


Watching the State of the Union last night I was taken that President Obama made the mention that we could have an AIDS free generation and not only have it but it is within reach.  This clearly, to me, seems like an incredible idea but I seriously have my doubts--- and here is why:

1. I have been involved with the AIDS crisis since 1986 when I first became aware of it at the tender age of just 19 years old when a friend of mine was diagnosed with what then was "the gay cancer" and was within six months dead!  That has been nearly thirty years of involvement and I have heard a lot of things in those thirty years that promise great advances, possible cures and even scheduled treatments. I also have watched six hundred friends die from AIDS before I stopped counting. I also know that we are far from an AIDS free generation when it seems so little is being done.
2. FACT:   As the U.S. observes the tenth anniversary of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the landmark global AIDS program which President George W. Bush first proposed in his 2003 State of the Union address, advocates from AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) urged President Obama to reconsider recent funding cuts he made to the lifesaving AIDS program which has saved millions of lives worldwide. AHF advocates also note that given his actions versus his rhetoric, President Obama’s highly touted goal of an ‘AIDS-free generation’—which received only a glancing mention in his State of the Union address last nightt—is unlikely to be achieved, as the funding cuts he’s instituted take devastating—and deadly—effect globally.       “By all accounts, PEPFAR has been a tremendous success, saving millions of lives while also serving as one of America’s most successful diplomacy efforts over the past decade,” said Michael Weinstein, President of AIDS Healthcare Foundation. “However, President Obama is also the first U.S. president to cut global AIDS funding, a shameful retreat at a time when, according to World Health Organization, there are 6.8 million who need treatment now but aren't receiving it, and at a time when we are seeing the real impact of treatment on saving lives and reducing new infections.”
   
   3. FACT:  A new survey focused on gay and bisexual men who use apps such as Grindr, Scruff and Manhunt to meet sexual partners found that nearly half had engaged in unprotected sex.
   Conducted by New York's Community Healthcare Network (CHN), "Zero Feet Away: Perpective on HIV/AIDS and Unprotected Sex in Men Who Have Sex With Men Utilizing Location-based Mobile Apps" found that although 80 percent of respondents said they were knowledgeable in how the HIV virus was transmitted, while 46.4 percent admitted to having bareback sex always, often or sometimes.
        The most frequently-cited reason for bare-backing among the 725 gay and bisexual men who were surveyed was "with condoms, [sex] does not feel the same."
        "Clearly, we've come a long way in educating people about HIV and AIDS," Dr. Freddy Molano, Assistant Vice President of HIV Programs and Services at CHN, said in the report. "Yet among certain populations, HIV/AIDS is on the ride, and that's alarming."
        Added co-author Renato Barucco: "The survey findings show a clear disconnect between the reasons why men engage in unprotected anal intercourse and the way prevention initiatives attempt to address risk behaviors."
   
    4. The following is simply my opinion and should be taken as thus:
   
   
    In nearly the nearly thirty years of work in the trenches I have seen it all-- people who are compliant with all of there drugs and still die, people who are complaint with all of their drugs and who somehow pull through (in my circle there are five of us, counting myself, who have lived twenty years or more with AIDS), I have seen lovers thrown out of their homes because one of them died and a family took literally everything, I have seen hospital trays left in the hall because no one wanted to go into the hospital room.  On that note I have a very good friend who works at a "Christian" Nursing home and the staff when they found out a specific resident had AIDS and was there to to die, wanted nothing to do with him, let alone for care him-- this was just LAST YEAR!
   
   
   Yet President Obama has the gall to say we "are within grasp of an AIDS free generation. Really?  People can not afford or get access to basic HIV medications in Africa and "we are within grasp of an AIDS free generation.  Really?  The government keeps cutting funding to not only research a cure, cut funding to Ryan White Access and cut funding for services for people living with AIDS and yet somehow we are within reach to an AIDS free generation.  Really?  
   
   
   We have the largest influx of gay bareback movies, gay bareback porn studios and a gay society-- which I myself am gay--are largely burned out, overworked, underpaid and in my opinion under appreciated when it comes to what we do for AIDS.  
   
   
   We have a young gay society under twenty-five who know precious little about the struggle we the generation into our forties and more who were there and saw first hand all of the death, all of the suffering, all of the protests in the streets and I will go out on a limb and say attend an ACT UP funeral of one of its members in front of the White House with the "dead" in a pine coffin laying in the streets and we the mourners demanding change.
   
   
   We have Californians having the discussion whether condoms should be on all porn shoots gay or straight, laws in California which have been passed and yet we can not move past the idea that somehow by "enforcing" condom use we are stepping on the toes of those wishing "their freedom of expression".  Really?  But yet somehow we are within grasp of a generation that is AIDS free.
   
   
   We have a vast number of Americans who still view "victims of HIV/AIDS" as the minorities-- you know the "them" we always speak of--- gays, African Americans, drug users, prostitutes, the poor, the uneducated, the brother on the down low, the Hispanic woman who sleeps around to much, the gay man who who still anonymous gay sex in bath houses or sex clubs.... when in all reality it has been more than this group of "minorities" for a LONG time.  Yet somehow we still can not have a honest, frank and open discussion about sex--- yet President Obama believes we are within grasp of an AIDS free generation.
   
   
   5.  FACT:   We can not and will not have an AIDS free generation when funding is cut. 
   
   
    We can not and will not have an AIDS free generation when people refuse to have an open, frank, honest discussion about sex.  
   
   
   We can not and will not have an AIDS free generation until the church as a whole not only embraces those living with the disease, but gets off their knees praying but actually does something to address the issue, help those in need of help and make a concentrated effort to embrace everyone into their fold.
   
   
   We can not and will not have an AIDS free generation until we do everything in our power to prevent sexual transmission to those who choose to make porn a career.
   
   
   We can not and will not have an AIDS free generation until we make AIDS medication to every single living human being on on the planet, and not only make it available but affordable.
   
   
   We can not and will not have an AIDS free generation until we do everything within our power to help our brothers and sisters, like myself, who are living with AIDS.  We need to be able to provide medical coverage that would continue at affordable rates for those wishing to return to work, we need to provide the time off needed by our employees if they need it for medical purposes to recover from an AIDS related illness, we need real equal employment opportunities for those living with AIDS.  And finally we need to provide affordable and accessible college opportunities to those living with AIDS-- many who do not realize that there is available funding where we could in all honesty pay very little out of pocket to not only get a degree but get a job that would once and for all get us out of poverty.
   
   
   Finally, we can not and will not have an AIDS free generation until we treat this disease as a human disease and not a minority disease.  That the attitude and change that needs to take place is what has happened with Americans embracing Cancer (i.e. The Susan G. Koman Fundraising events), Heart Disease and even Alzheimer's and until all of these things Mr. President happens we will NEVER have an AIDS free generation!

HIV Vaccine Advances to Stage Two Human Clinical Trials

Scientists were shocked to discover the cure for HIV was simply an overwhelming dose of microscopic AIDS ribbons. OK, not really. Still, great news!

The various HIV “cures” and vaccines in development continue to speed ahead, with one pharmaceutical company’s product advancing into stage 2 human clinical trials.

Sangamo BioSciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: SGMO) announced today the initiation of two new Phase 2 clinical studies (SB-728-1101 and SB-728-902, Cohort 5) in its program to develop a “functional cure” for HIV/AIDS. Sangamo’s ZFP Therapeutic^® approach (SB-728-T) generates T-cells that are resistant to HIV infection using its zinc finger nuclease (ZFN) technology to permanently disrupt the DNA sequence encoding CCR5, a co-receptor used by HIV to enter cells. The company expects to present data from its SB-728-T HIV clinical trials at appropriate medical meetings in 2012.

“We are delighted to be able to open these two important clinical studies ahead of schedule,” said Geoff Nichol, M.B. Ch.B., Sangamo’s executive vice president, research and development. “Data from earlier Phase 1 trials demonstrated a statistically significant relationship between the number of circulating T-cells in which both CCR5 genes are modified and the reduction in HIV viral load in infected subjects during an interruption of anti-retroviral therapy. Both of these new Phase 2 clinical trials are specifically designed to confirm and further investigate these findings.”

The new studies employ two approaches to increase the number of engrafted T-cells in which both CCR5 gene copies are modified (biallelically modified) in SB-728-T-treated, HIV-infected subjects. The first, an extension of an ongoing trial (SB-728-902, Cohort 5), is designed to further investigate the effect of SB-728-T treatment on HIV viral load in subjects that are naturally heterozygous for the CCR5 delta-32 gene mutation (i.e. one of their two CCR5 gene copies has the mutation and one is normal).

 The second study (SB-728-1101), in HIV-infected subjects without the CCR5 delta-32 mutation, employs a conditioning pretreatment designed to significantly enhance the number of engrafted biallelically modified T-cells.

The Sangamo vaccine is one of several products racing neck and neck toward mass market approval and release. It’s safe to say that if the first “cure” to hit the market is produced by the American pharmaceutical industry, it will be a costly product that creates enormous corporate wealth.

"Functional HIV Cure" Trial Advances

Via press release:

Sangamo BioSciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: SGMO) announced today the initiation of two new Phase 2 clinical studies (SB-728-1101 and SB-728-902, Cohort 5) in its program to develop a "functional cure" for HIV/AIDS. Sangamo's ZFP Therapeutic® approach (SB-728-T) generates T-cells that are resistant to HIV infection using its zinc finger nuclease (ZFN) technology to permanently disrupt the DNA sequence encoding CCR5, a co-receptor used by HIV to enter cells. The company expects to present data from its SB-728-T HIV clinical trials at appropriate medical meetings in 2012.

Most interesting: "In addition to safety, the study will evaluate the effect of escalating doses of Cytoxan on SB-728-T engraftment, the effect of SB-728-T treatment on viral load following HAART interruption." In other words (I think), they'll be looking at whether patients can cease taking meds after the treatment.

New HIV Vaccine Approved for Human Tests

Dr. Chil-Yong Kang  

 

A team of Canadian scientists from the University of Western Ontario have been given approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to start testing humans on an experimental HIV vaccine they have developed, reported the Toronto Star in a Dec. 20 article.

The scientists have been researching a cure for 20 years and will finally be able to start testing the SAV001 vaccine in January. The group will test the vaccine on forty healthy people who have contracted the HIV virus.

"We started the basic science research two decades ago," Dr. Chil-Yong Kang, professor of virology at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario said. "The vaccine development, we started 10 years ago. This is incredible for us to get to this stage of development."
Kang said that the FDA’s decision to allow testing is a "milestone" and that the vaccine "is the first preventive HIV vaccine approved for clinical trials to use a killed whole HIV-1 virus to activate the immune response in humans."

This method has been used a number of times to create vaccines for hepatitis, rabies influenza and polio.
The virus used in the vaccine has been genetically changed so that it can no longer cause HIV. The scientists continued to inactive the virus by using chemicals and radiation.

 

"In the past, people did not use this strategy (using a killed whole HIV virus) because people did not know how to make a safer virus and people did not know how to make large quantities of it," Kang said. "Now we have solved those problems by the genetic engineering of the virus."

The Star reports that the according to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative there are thirty HIV vaccines that are being tested in phase 1 trials around the world. Several of these vaccines are using the same method that Kang and his team used.

The Canadian Association of HIV Research President, Dr. Jonathan Angel, said it is thrilling for the FDA to approve the vaccine but creating an effective cure for HIV will take awhile. This is because the virus is extremely complex and scientists do not fully understand it yet.

If the vaccine passes stage one trials it will then be given to 600 HIV-negative individuals who are at high risk for HIV infection.

In the last phase the vaccine would be used on 6,000 HIV-negative people. Half would be given the SAV001 and half would be untreated. Officials would follow the progress of the individuals for three years.
Researchers have tried several attempts in the past to find a cure for HIV. EDGE reported in a Sept. 21 article that by stripping the cholesterol out of the HIV virus’ membrane, researchers discovered they could "prevent an excessive initial response against the virus by the body’s immune system". T-cells carry out this response and are the same cells HIV infects.

"HIV is very sneaky," the head of a research project, Imperial College London’s Adriano Basso said. "It evades the host’s defenses by triggering overblown responses that damage the immune system. It’s like revving your car in first gear for too long -- eventually the engine blows out."

HIV Is Not a Crime--or Is It?

HIV Is Not a Crime is a shocking film that asks some basic questions we all need to think about.
Do you think people living with HIV should have to register as sex offenders? Do you believe people living with HIV should be sentenced to 25 years in prison for a sexual act that did not result in transmission of the HIV virus?

Would the fact that an individual did not disclose his or her HIV-positive status change your answer? Do you think someone living with HIV should be virally defined as a second-class citizen with fewer rights and more legal liabilities than someone who is either uninfected or is unaware of his or her status HIV status?
HIV is not a crime. Or is it?

Thirty-four states and two U.S. territories have laws on their books that state that if a person living with HIV has sexual relations without prior disclosure of his or her HIV-positive status, then that person is committing a crime. Some laws permit sentencing a person living with HIV to jail (for up to 25 years) for having consensual sex with someone who is HIV-negative (or does not know his or her HIV status) without prior HIV disclosure -- often even if a condom is used and no HIV is transmitted.

Prosecutions against HIV-positive individuals have occurred in at least 39 states (some states have used non-HIV-specific laws for sexual assault), invoking a spectrum of charges including attempted murder, sexual assault, and assault with a deadly weapon. Yes, ignorance has led to defining blood, semen, vaginal fluid, vomit, and saliva of people living with HIV as "deadly weapons" by the courts -- and has even led to claims of "bio-terrorism" -- even though HIV is now considered a chronic manageable disease. In five states alone more than 500 people have been charged under these laws.

These laws are problematic for several reasons. First, they violate the human rights of people living with HIV by creating a viral sub-class of people (based upon testing positive for the HIV virus) who are singled out for unjust prosecution and excessive punishment in the absence of actual wrongdoing for behaviors that otherwise would be legal for anyone who has not tested HIV-positive. This violates our nation's values of fair and equal treatment under the law.

HIV criminalization laws were supposedly drafted to prevent the transmission of the virus, yet they actually do the opposite: they drive people away from HIV testing, since knowing your status can subject you to criminal prosecution.

In fact, these laws are at odds with evidence-based prevention strategies. They place the burden of responsibility for disclosure of HIV status and the negotiation of condom use solely on the HIV-positive individuals. They absolve the HIV-negative or untested of responsibility for their own health or the health of others. They also absolve the untested of prosecution under HIV transmission laws. Incidentally, the CDC estimates that 20 percent of HIV-positive Americans do not know they are living with HIV.

These punitive laws drive people at risk of HIV infection underground and away from HIV testing, counseling, referral to treatment, care, and support. Evidence-based prevention strategies call for encouraging at-risk individuals to seek out testing, information, treatment, care, and support.
The great majority of HIV-related prosecutions have taken place in North America, Western Europe, and Australia. But in recent years, many poorer countries have also adopted such laws. In sub-Saharan Africa, 20 countries have passed HIV-specific criminal statutes in the last five years.

So what is being done to combat these counterproductive, unjust laws? At the United Nations, the "Global Commission on HIV and the Law" was launched in June 2010 by UNDP and UNAIDS. It has investigated the relationship between legal environments, human rights, and HIV and aims to develop actionable, evidence-informed and human-rights-based recommendations for effective legal responses that promote and protect the human rights of people living with, and those most vulnerable to, HIV. The Commission has reported its finding in Geneva this month to the Programme Coordinating Board of UNAIDS and will issue a final report in early 2012.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee, a California Democrat and member of the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, has also introduced H.R. 3053 -- the "Repeal HIV Discrimination Act" -- in the U.S. Congress. This bill creates incentives and support for states to reform existing policies that use the criminal law to target people living with HIV for felony charges and excessive punishment for behavior that is otherwise legal (consensual sex between adults) and that poses no measurable risk of HIV transmission.

What can you do to address this social injustice? First, you should contact your member of Congress and ask that he or she co-sponsor H.R.3053. Next, you can pass around this link -- and post it to Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks -- for HIV Is Not a Crime, a compelling, powerful, and tragic film about the criminalization of HIV in America, created by POZ Magazine founder Sean Strub.

Nick Rhoades and Robert Suttle are two HIV-positive, gay men interviewed in the film. On Thursday, Dec. 15th in Geneva, they spoke at the Programme Coordinating Board Meeting of UNAIDS to discuss their own prosecutions and convictions as lifetime sex offenders, due to being accused of having sex without disclosing their HIV-positive status, even though both used condoms during sex and neither transmitted HIV to their accusers. Please listen to their stories.

To learn more about this issue, go to:
http://www.hivlawandpolicy.org/public/initiatives/positivejusticeproject
http://www.hivlawcommission.org/
http://www.unaids.org/en/ (the UNAIDS website)

Dentist Office Bans HIV+ Employee from Touching Doorknobs, Sprays Him with Lysol

 

Shortly after testing positive for HIV, James White informed his Great Expressions Dental Clinic office manager of his status, but asked that she keep his health private. Imagine White’s surprise days later when he was summoned by the company’s regional director and berated for “having AIDS.”
White was informed that there would be no change to his responsibilities as he didn’t work directly with dental patients, and posed zero risk of infecting anyone. But things pretty much went straight to hell from there.

He says he was prohibited from touching doorknobs in the office. Staff members followed him around with Lysol, spraying and wiping down the surfaces he touched. He was subjected to unexpected changes in his schedule—called and told to come in later than scheduled, or to leave earlier than expected. When he complied with the scheduling offers, he was written up for unexcused absences.
After months of this, he said he was overwhelmed.

His health took a turn for the worse, and he was hospitalized for a week. During that time, the clinic decided to fire him. They called him the day before he was to return to work and informed him that he was fired for excessive unexcused absences.

“I felt like my character was destroyed,” he says. “I went from wanting to be an activist—someone who spoke to groups about HIV—to someone who didn’t want to leave my room for six months.”
His lawyer Nicole Thompson says that “it’s very clear [White] has been traumatized by this.”

Thompson notes he has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and White himself says he continues to see mental health professionals weekly to address his concerns. He still has trouble going into public places. For example, White says he “blacks out” when he goes to the grocery store and doesn’t remember being there. Right before the blackouts, White says, he feels like people are following him around and sanitizing everything he touches or that people are talking about him.

White, having a relatively clearcut legal case on his hands, has sued the heck out of his former employer. The Detroit area Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is overseeing the case, and suggested that Great Expressions settle out of court with White for a figure around $185,000 in compensatory and punitive damages. So far, the dental clinic has refused so it looks like the case will be settled in court, where a judge will have the opportunity to hit the discriminatory office with even heftier damages.

Our condolences go out to White. Nobody should have to deal with this nonsense as they are delicately navigating life-altering changes to their health. We applaud you for your bravery. You’re setting a fantastic example for all those who have faced workplace discrimination due to a medical condition. You go boy.

13 Arrested for World AIDS Day Protest

Thirteen AIDS activists were arrested in downtown Manhattan today in a joint protest organized by Housing Works, Occupy Wall Street, and others. Among their demands is the institution of an unprecedented tax on millionaires with the revenue specifically directed to fight HIV/AIDS.

Via press release:

In the tradition of the working-class hero of Sherwood Forest, the marchers and the 13 Robins were demanding the implementation of a Financial Transaction Tax on Wall Street and a New York State millionaires tax in order to fund the fight against AIDS here in New York and worldwide. New York City and the federal government have backed away from their commitment to fighting HIV/AIDS in dramatic ways during the past year. “It’s a lie when we’re told there isn’t enough money to fight AIDS,” said Felix Rivera-Pitre, a VOCAL-NY leader who is living with HIV/AIDS and currently in a homeless shelter. “The reality is that Wall Street crashed our economy, and now politicians are saying there’s less money for basic needs like healthcare and housing, or for keeping their promise to fund HIV/AIDS treatment overseas.”

View more photos on the Flickr stream of Housing Works.


UNRELATED: You may recall Felix Rivera-Pitre (quoted above) who made international news when he was sucker-punched on video by a member of the NYPD.

Labels: activism, Housing Works, Michael Bloomberg, NYC, Wall Street, World AIDS Day

Hershey School Turns Away Boy With HIV

NBC Philadelphia, Tim Furlong

The Delaware County boy and his mother say it's discrimination and now the Milton Hersey School is facing a lawsuit.

HIV-Positive Boy Denied Admittance to...

 

The Milton Hershey School was founded by the chocolate tycoon as a school that "nurtures and educates children in social and financial need to lead fulfilling and productive lives."

But it seems that fulfillment won’t be coming for a 13-year-old honor student from Delaware County who is infected with the virus that causes AIDS.

"I feel no other teenager should go through this, being denied just because they have HIV," the boy said in an exclusive interview with NBC Philadelphia’s Denise Nakano.

His lawyer has filed a discrimination suit in U.S. District Court that alleges that the Hershey School "violated multiple anti-discrimination laws" by not admitting the boy based on him being HIV Positive.

The lawsuit was filed under a pseudonym and the boy and his mother's identities weren't revealed per their request.

Multimedia

Admission Denied for Student With HIV

• Read the entire discrimination complaint

The private boarding school doesn’t deny that they rejected the boy’s admission because of concerns for the health and safety of fellow students. They even petitioned to have the court review the case, they said.

Milton Hershey School released a statement Wednesday saying in part that “in order to protect our children in this unique environment, we cannot accommodate the needs of students with chronic communicable diseases that pose a direct threat to the health and safety of others.”

(The entire statement from the Hershey School is listed below.)

Ronda Goldfein from the AIDS Law Project is representing the boy and his mother in the federal discrimination lawsuit.

"If you have a school that’s open to the public, then it’s open to the public," Goldfein said. "If you have a student that has a particular need and requests assistance, then you accommodate. You don’t simply say we don’t like you, we don’t like your diagnosis, you can’t come here."

"It makes me angry, like really, really angry because they don't understand how great he is," the boy's mother said. 

The 13-year-old has lived with HIV all of his life but doesn’t feel it defines him.

He excels in school, is active in sports and is learning to speak two foreign languages. He was hoping to go to Hershey -- a cost-free, private boarding school for children from low-income families -- to advance his education.

"They didn’t look at whether my client presented any threat, they just said 13-year old boy with HIV, oh no, that’s too dangerous," Goldfein said.

The lawsuit calls for Hershey to admit the boy and give unspecified monetary damages.

"I think that it was wrong to put me through emotional distress," the boy said.

Here is the entire statement from the Hershey School:

Today, Milton Hershey School had planned to file a request in federal court asking the court to review our decision to deny enrollment to a child who is HIV positive because of concerns for the health and safety of our current students.

We had been in discussions with the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania, which is representing this 13-year-old boy. Recognizing the complex legal issues, the School was preparing to ask the court to weigh in on this matter. Unfortunately, attorneys for the young man took the adversarial action of filing a lawsuit against the School.

The decision to deny enrollment was a challenging one for us to make. Like all our enrollment decisions, we need to balance our desire to serve the needs of an individual child seeking admission with our obligation to protect the health and safety of all 1,850 children already in our care.

Attorneys for this young man and his mother have suggested that this case is comparable to the Ryan White case. But this case is actually nothing like the Ryan White case. Milton Hershey School is not a day school, where students go home to their family at the end of the day. Instead, this is a unique home-like environment, a pre-K to 12 residential school where children live in homes with 10 to 12 other students on our campus 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In order to protect our children in this unique environment, we cannot accommodate the needs of students with chronic communicable diseases that pose a direct threat to the health and safety of others.The reason is simple. We are serving children, and no child can be assumed to always make responsible decisions which protect the well-being of others.

That is why, after careful review and analysis, we determined we could not put our children at risk.

Pope Implies That People With Poor Ethics Spread AIDS

This week a U.N. AIDS report said the number of new HIV infections worldwide has stayed at about 2.7 million for the last three years, suggesting that the epidemic is leveling off. That’s great news! But then comes along Pope Benedict XVI reminding everyone that unethical, slutty, un-Godly people spread HIV. Uuuggghhh.

 Here’s what the Pope said exactly while speaking about the AIDS epidemic in Africa:

Above all, [the spread of HIV] is an ethical problem. The change of behaviour that [solving Africa's AIDS epidemic] requires—for example, sexual abstinence, rejection of sexual promiscuity, fidelity within marriage—ultimately involves the question of integral development, which demands a global approach and a global response from the Church.
“For if it is to be effective, the prevention of AIDS must be based on a sex education that is itself grounded in an anthropology anchored in the natural law and enlightened by the word of God and the Church’s teaching.”

On one hand, he has a point. If a person knows about the importance of getting tested, knowing their status, communicating with sex partners and taking the necessary precautions to prevent HIV, not doing so could be construed as deliberate and unethical. But in Africa where many communities do not have safe-sex educators to disseminate information about HIV-prevention, the spread of the disease cannot be marked up to pure ethics and morality—money, government support, education and condoms all play a part too.

It’s a double-edged sword because even if the Pope considers governments “unethical” for failing to equip their citizens with HIV-prevention info, we can only imagine that sex education “enlightened by the word of God and the Church’s teaching” would also fail to teach people how to responsibly and safely fuck and go for an ineffective abstinence-only approach instead.

Pope Benedict XVI got a lot of well deserved flack in 2009 when he said that condoms in Africa actually make the AIDS problem worse. But he has since backtracked on that by saying that male hookers and pretty much everyone else can use condoms because “using condoms ‘is the lesser evil than passing HIV onto a partner.’

So while he’s managed to offensively imply that people who catch and spread HIV to others have some sort of moral or ethical failing, he’s at least implicated governments for those same failings while instructing the larger Catholic following that using condoms is more ethical and moral than

6 Parishioners Dead After Lying Pastor Tells Them They’ve Been Cured of HIV

 

A Sky News undercover investigation has revealed that evangelical churches in the UK have been lying to HIV positive patients about the curative powers of holy water, and insisting that patients stop taking their HIV medications. Now at least six are dead.

The broadcaster sent three undercover reporters to the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN), in the south London Borough of Southwark.

 

All of them were told by pastors they could be healed.

The team – who are all HIV positive – had water sprayed in their faces as part of the healing process.

They were also shouted at and told it would rid them of the devil.

One of the pastors, Rachel Holmes, told Sky News, that SCOAN has a “100% success rate”, adding: “if symptoms such as vomiting or diarrhoea persist, it is actually a sign of the virus leaving the body”.

Except that’s diarrhea and vomiting aren’t a sign that HIV is rocketing out of your body because Christ commands it to. No, those are signs you are dying of HIV. 

Multiple investigations into the – we’re just going to go ahead and play fortune teller here for a second – criminal actions these churches are engaged in.

In addition to the deaths that have been reported, a case of HIV transmission has been documented by the boyfriend of a male parishioner who stopped HIV treatment after being “cured” by his pastor.

Larry Kramer, talks about what's missing from gay activism: From Metro Weekly

Since the publication of Faggots in 1978, Larry Kramer has been speaking truth – as he sees it – to power.

What's more unusual, Kramer has been telling his uncomfortable truths to those who, like him, claim to be fighting that power.

Kramer, 76, is comfortable making others uncomfortable. Anger, he says in his cluttered, book-filled apartment off Washington Square Park in Manhattan, is ''a wonderfully healthy emotion.''
Although Faggots brought him attention, it was a few years later, as he began to witness the devastation of the strange disease that would become known as AIDS, that Kramer became an immovable object in a then-radical resistance that began with the founding of Gay Men's Health Crisis. GMHC begat his play, The Normal Heart, which debuted at The Public Theater in the East Village in 1985. That play begat the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, better known as ACT UP.

The Normal Heart's story of an unrelentingly aggressive activist who is fighting for research, drugs and community activism in the face of a new illness that is killing gay men is Kramer's story. Kramer's sequel to The Normal Heart, The Destiny of Me, opened off-Broadway in 1992 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1993.

D.C. is Kramer's hometown – he went to Woodrow Wilson High School – but The Normal Heart has never been staged in the area, despite several attempts to do so.

Following a Broadway staging of the play that received the 2011 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play, The Normal Heart finally is coming to the D.C. area for a staged reading on Nov. 7 by Forum Theatre Company in residence at the Round House Theatre in Silver Spring.

As talk of a movie – helmed by Glee's Ryan Murphy – and a national tour of the Broadway revival make headlines, Kramer says the play that was once a ''cry of alarm'' is now a story of ''our history.''
That doesn't mean that Kramer sees much progress for gay people in the more than 30 years since he wrote Faggots. And, he's sorry to say, he doesn't see much happening in the near future – both because of what he sees as the apathy of ''the gay community,'' and because he sees the ''enemy'' as recognizing that apathy and willing to put the time and money into stopping equality advancements.

But at least there is the play.
METRO WEEKLY: It has to be amazing to see The Normal Heart back in circulation.
LARRY KRAMER: It just came out of the blue. Joel Grey had arranged a benefit reading here. It sold out and was very well cast and directed, and everyone was just dumbfounded by how current it seemed to be. From the very first line, ''I know there's something wrong,'' you could hear a pin drop for the rest of the night.
Daryl Roth, who's a very powerful Broadway producer, was there, and she said, ''I'm going to take this to Broadway.'' And she did. And that's what got us going again, and it's been like that ever since. It's an unreal experience to have a play come back so powerfully so many years later, almost as if it was new.
MW: To a lot of people, it is completely new.
KRAMER: That's the thing, we wanted young people to see it. When we first opened, the older gays who we thought might come didn't. I wasn't surprised because I've learned from previous productions that gays are not always the best supporters of gay art, of gay writers. They just aren't.
It was Daryl's idea to get the youngsters in. If they could prove they were 30 or under, she'd sell them a ticket for $30. And they started coming. And they started telling their friends, and their friends. So the audiences were very young, which was wonderful. And they didn't have any preconceived notions about anything. It was all new to them. They were amazed, because they didn't know all of this.
MW: When you think of the clarion call that you provided in the '80s, when nobody wanted to hear it –
KRAMER: Well, it's history now. It's not so much a message play.
MW: How do you want those ''under 30'' people to see it?
KRAMER: As I said at the speech I gave at the Tonys, this is our history. We must know our history. And I think people come to that now and see it as that. It's a different play than it was when it was first done in [1985]. Then, it was meant to be a clarion call, as you say, a cry of alarm. And everybody thought it was very agitprop, a term I came to loathe. And now it's seen as a play, and critics are – what's been especially nice to me – responding to the quality of the writing. People always overlooked that because the stuff that I write about is so political. Somehow, for most critics, that doesn't seem to go hand in hand. It drives me nuts. I work very hard on my writing.
MW: People want to know, what's the movie status?
KRAMER: The movie is being prepared. Mark Ruffalo is supposed to play Ned Weeks. Ryan Murphy is directing it and I've written the screenplay. I know he wants Julia Roberts to be the doctor, and I know we both want Jim Parsons to repeat his performance as Tommy. I just assume we're going to shoot next summer, but I haven't heard that from him. But I know he seems to be revving up somehow.
MW: That would be good.
KRAMER: It's about time.
MW: What about the fact that The Normal Heart has never been produced in your hometown, in D.C.?
KRAMER: Well, you know the old expression: ''You can't hit a homer in your own hometown.'' A little is that. Zelda Fichandler didn't like the play, and she was running Arena [Stage] then. So, that was that there. And [Studio Theatre's] Joy Zinoman took it on, and proceeded to fire the director that I had given it to without consulting with me. She found some unknown and I wouldn't go along with that. And Roger Stevens, who was running Kennedy Center, didn't like the play and wouldn't allow it to be done there.
MW: You said that you're hoping to take the Broadway production on tour.
KRAMER: Well, it's more than that. Daryl Roth has been the most amazing producer anyone could ever work with. She's just in love with this play, and she pledged to me that she would take it on tour and that she would get it done in England. And she's working toward both of those. It's hard to arrange tours, because theaters are booked way in advance. And George C. Wolfe, who's going to direct it, doesn't want to go into a big theater. He wants to go into a moderate-sized theater. Daryl will find it. She's just that kind of a producer.
Talks are pretty far advanced in Washington. I won't tell you where or how, but we want it done when the International AIDS Conference is there [from July 22 to July 27, 2012]. So that's the goal, and I believe it will happen.
And then she and Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, are working to set it up in London.
MW: Would you come down for the hometown staging?
KRAMER: I might. If it's the first run on the tour, I probably will. George is the most wonderful director I've ever worked with, so I'd be happy to see what he does again. He's just a genius. He directed the Broadway production.
MW: Turning to current politics, you made a splash talking about what, actually, all of the organizations were already talking about: the value of state marriage equality and the reason why there are all these federal lawsuits challenging the Defense of Marriage Act. And now Servicemembers Legal Defense Network has filed a lawsuit challenging military spousal benefits – saying that spousal benefits need to be equal for same-sex married couples in the military.
KRAMER: Good for them. There's just so many fights. I'm sort of surprised that Boies and Olson – they did such unbelievable work, and that somehow it's being held to ransom by the financiers of all these suits that keep the enemy at our door so assiduously. All they do is file lawsuits, and that's going to go on forever. Wherever we win, they're going to come in and sue. I don't know what it takes to make the Supreme Court do its job properly. They're probably happy that they don't have to worry about it yet. So we're caught in this terrible situation. I'm not the only one saying that.
MW: You look at the '70s, when Faggots came out, the devastation of the '80s, and then you see wedding cakes in New York this summer. What sort of a path is that? Is it a coherent path, is it just that history happens?
KRAMER: Are you looking for patterns?
MW: What's the long view?
KRAMER: Take it a day at a time.
I remember in ACT UP, everything was so bad all the time that we just sort of had to make it up as we went along, what we were going to do. Because today's emergency wasn't necessarily tomorrow's emergency, or the other way around. People who were in one job one day weren't there the next, and you were constantly having to educate people.
People always ask me, ''What was it like?'' I don't look back. I look to today and to what we still have to do in the days to come. What we achieved in the past has always been haphazard and more often by luck than by skill.
We're still a leaderless population. The same things I've complained about since the beginning have not been rectified in any way.
I know that there's a lot more sympathy for Obama than I'm prepared to show him. We still haven't got these things, you know. I don't consider ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' some major victory. It's a small, dishonest political move that Clinton did to enchain us, and it's been unknotted. But it's for a very small percentage of us. Everybody acts as if it's a major thing for all of us, and it isn't. And he knows that. It's been a small gift he's given us to throw us a bone. The big gifts, he's not giving us – no one's giving us. And that hurts. I don't see that changing.
MW: What do you see as the big gifts?
KRAMER: Equality, pure and simple. From the Supreme Court. That we're allowed to get married, for a start, and get all the benefits that straight people get. That's it. That's the whole megillah, as the Jews say.
Anyway, we do not have equality. That's what the Bill of Rights says we're entitled to. That's what the Constitution says we're entitled to. And we don't have it. I don't see us getting it for a while, quite frankly, because the other side is willing to spend too much money to see that we don't get it. The Catholic Church, the Mormon Church, primarily, have very deep pockets to see that we don't get it. And they've learned this tactic that I don't think any of us saw coming, which is that the minute we win, find something to sue. Tie it up in the courts. And they can tie 'em up in courts until we're all dead. It's pathetic.
MW: Do you think that's more a failure of LGBT leadership or of mainstream leadership, or whatever you want to call it?
KRAMER: At the height of the Holocaust, when Jews were being shoveled into the ovens by the trainload, a great woman by the name of Hannah Arendt, who was a political philosopher – Jewish, obviously, and German – said, in essence, to all of the Jews in the world, ''Why are you allowing this to happen? Where is your army?'' She thought the Jews should actually have their own army, which was an unbelievable thing for a woman to say. And, in essence, she was saying, ''You brought all this on yourselves. You get what you deserve. You're not fighting back. And you've never fought back, ever, in your whole history.'' And I say that about us, too. People don't want to hear it.
Where are the ACT UPs today? Where are the anti-Vietnam [War] demonstrations of such amazing numbers today? This business with Wall Street is fine. I view it as rather disorganized, and I'm glad they're able to keep it together for so long. I don't hear what the demands are that are being met. The banks aren't folding up and going out of business.
I never understood why so few of us are willing to fight. At the height of the AIDS plague, from '91 to '96 when it was really awful – with how many millions of gay people, 10 [million], 20 [million], who the fuck knows how many, but a lot – there were no more than maybe 5,000 or 6,000 people in various ACT UP chapters around the country or in California with Project Inform who were willing to fight for their lives. I've never been able to understand that. So few of us were willing to fight to get those drugs. We got those drugs. ACT UP got those drugs. They're not there for any other reason.
And, now, all these people who want to get married so badly, where are the demonstrations? All these people who are married, don't they know that marriage is what I call a ''feel-good'' marriage – doesn't provide anything except nice, warm feelings? That seems to me to be cowardly – a cowardly evasion of the truth.
We're all in an enormous state of denial somehow – and we continue to be. And it doesn't get any better.
MW: Did you think the Get Equal White House protests about ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' were something like what you're describing?
KRAMER: Get Equal is something that was very well meaning that just seemed to come and go. It was well financed by a very rich man, but I didn't see it drawing the kind of support or troops that it needed. I don't know why activism is so scarce now.
MW: Do you even consider something like the Human Rights Campaign to be activism?
KRAMER: I think HRC is the dregs. I think it's the toilet of the gay movement.
MW: So, you have no opinion of HRC?
KRAMER: [Laughs.]
MW: That's a criticism leveled against them by people – maybe not in those exact terms – but, why?
KRAMER: What more can be said? I find them useless, and I find them perpetuating con jobs on all of us. Ass-kissers extraordinaire.
MW: One can criticize things that they do, but then, things like the hospital visitation memo, which might not matter....
KRAMER: What is the hospital visitation memo? We've been able to visit people in the hospital almost since the beginning. It was never a big problem here – '
MW: Maybe not here [in New York City], but it was in Florida, where Janice Langbehn wasn't allowed in to see her partner as she died. I grew up in Ohio, I can certainly see places there where a gay couple wouldn't be allowed to see each other. I feel like, at some point, things that might seem ''past'' for people in New York, California, D.C., have more relevance in other areas of the country that have anti-gay marriage amendments in their constitutions and it's going to be a long time going before they get to the place where New York is.
KRAMER: I think we should have learned by now that this "pebble at a time" attempt to make right is just that. They're pebbles. We need bricks. Until we're ready to throw bricks, we're not going to get anywhere. You can name any kinds of wonderful things [HRC has] done, but they still have not changed the basic problem: We are not equal. We do not have equality. They do not look at the big picture, they look at the small picture. As does every other gay person, who is just happy to go home at night and go back into their state of denials.
It's a very, very passive population, and that is our great tragedy. I love being gay, I love gays. It hurts me to say this. These are all lessons that I've learned painfully since 1981, but until we learn to fight back we get what we deserve.
MW: If you had those troops today, what would you do?
KRAMER: We have the troops, and we did it.
MW: But what would today's mission be?
KRAMER: Same thing. You go after the enemy. You organize yourself, and you divide up what you have to attack, and you go after it. It's no mystery.
ACT UP, at its height in New York, had 1,500 members. We had so many committees going after so many pressure points in getting us these drugs, in getting us this research. There were meetings that you could go to every night, seven nights a week. We were organized, and we were smart. And we got it. We had the smart ones figuring out the strategy, and we had the street troops. The good cop/bad cop. Every corporation works that way. The street troops were there to protest, to show you that we mean business. The strategy is being figured out and being delivered to them at their committee meetings, saying, ''We want this, or else.''
No big mystery. If there's 20 million of us, that's 20 million soldiers. When we get angry enough that we don't have what we deserve, when we get angry enough that the taxes we pay don't get us what they get everyone else, then maybe we'll do something about it. I don't see that happening. So, therefore, we stay like we are, and leave it to the HRCs of the world to pick up the tiny pebbles.
It's not a mysterious process. It's called visibility, anger, unity. We don't have that.
MW: We definitely don't have unity.
KRAMER: Name me one gay leader. Who have we got? I don't see anybody. I don't hear anybody saying what I'm saying to the extent that I'm saying it. Where is a gay leader that people can hear? We've never been able to birth him or her.
The few good ones we've had in the past – [former National Gay & Lesbian Task Force Executive Director] Ginny Apuzzo, [former Human Rights Campaign Fund co-chair] Vivian Shapiro, [former NGLTF Executive Director] Urvashi Vaid, interestingly all women – have all, in the end, given up in despair. My friend Rodger McFarlane committed suicide out of despair for all of this, after having built three wonderful organizations – tried to bring them all together, tried to make everyone work with each other, called all the leaders into Washington to meet and stop backbiting. It doesn't happen. And, I guess, my saying all this just depresses everybody into doing less.
MW: You don't see the birth of a perfect leader who would pull everybody together?
KRAMER: I wish I could. I wish I would make enough people angry enough to do something. I mean, ACT UP was anger. ACT UP was made out of anger and fear. I happen to think anger is a wonderfully healthy emotion. Until you have anger and fear, you don't have any kind of an activist movement.
MW: Do you think that pebbles – to continue your metaphor – actually decrease the fear?
KRAMER: I think the drugs decrease the fear, not the pebbles. Suddenly, we weren't all going to die. And, so you can go back into your state of denial instead of realizing that how we got those drugs should lead us to the next step, building on what we were able to accomplish. That's where organizations like GMHC have fallen down. When Paul Popham and I started the organization, we hoped that its future would be very different, that it would become an advocate for gay health, that we would work with getting recognition and insurance and all kinds of things. It didn't happen. I guess I haven't got much good to say about anything today, and I'm sorry.
MW: But there are accomplishments, there are changes.
KRAMER: I don't look to the past, I look to the future. I used to have this fight with Frank Kameny all the time, who had to constantly be congratulated about all the wonderful things that had been done because of him, instead of looking at the things that still hadn't been done.
I would criticize the past for not giving us the future, and, of course, he's the one that gave us the past in his eyes so he would get mad at me and say, ''Look at how much we've accomplished.'' Well, I don't think we've accomplished all that much. I really don't.
MW: You don't see gay lives as being lived differently, more openly, more successfully than they were 30 years ago?
KRAMER: A lot of that is because the culture has provided that for everybody. It's not for anything we can take credit for. I think we want to take credit for it – ''Look how far we've come'' – but we didn't do much to get there. More of us are here, more of us are out, because that's the nature of life today, for all minorities.
We still are treated like shit, and we still aren't equal. So, if you want to look at that as how far we've come, be my guest. I just won't join you.
I'm glad my play's out there. That's nice. I just want people to see what I'm talking about. People come out of this play crying, saying, ''What can I do? What can I do?'' Well, the play tells you what you can do -- but I don't see you doing it.

More HIV vaccine news

While many who work down in the trenches of HIV/AIDS activism have long given up any hope of an effective vaccine in our lifetimes, small glimmers of hope continue to occasionally peek through the clouds. From a small vaccine study in Spain, a result that may reduce HIV to a "minor chronic infection" such as herpes:

The trial demonstrated how the vaccine stimulates the production of lymphocytes B, which produces HIV attacking antibodies that block the virus from infecting healthy cells. Blood tests during the 48th week revealed that 72.7% of the treated volunteers had developed these HIV fighting antibodies. However generating a long lasting response against future attacks truly renders the vaccine effective. This is achieved when the body maintains a basic memory level of T lymphocytes, which are generated after the first attack and can circulate the body for years. The T lymphocytes are responsible for stimulating the attacked cell's immune response, which can then identify and destroy the HIV virus. Blood tests during the 48th week revealed that the 85% of the patients maintained the memory T lymphocytes immune response. "MVA-B immune profile meets, initially, the requirements for a promising HIV vaccine," says Esteban. Although it does not remove the virus from the body, the immune response induced by the vaccine could keep the virus under control by destroying the infected cell.

A new phase of trials with infected volunteers is set to commence. While this and other vaccine studies have showed some promise, most have failed. And none have been shown to work in all subjects.

HIV/AIDS Treatment Advancing--possibly~

Scientists have found a way to prevent HIV from damaging the immune system and say their discovery may offer a new approach to developing a vaccine against AIDS. Researchers from the United States and Europe working in laboratories on the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) found it is unable to damage the immune system if cholesterol is removed from the virus's membrane. "It's like an army that has lost its weapons but still has flags, so another army can recognize it and attack it," said Adriano Boasso of Imperial College London, who led the study. The team now plans to investigate how to use this way of inactivating the virus and possibly develop it into a vaccine.

Aiden Shaw: a short bio and G-rated pics

Aiden Shaw (born 22 February 1966, Harrow, Middlesex, United Kingdom) is a writer and also a pornographic actor, who appears in gay American pornographic movies.
He has starred in over fifty porn movies, many directed by Chi Chi LaRue. He has worked for Falcon Studios, Catalina Video, and Studio 2000 and Hothouse. In 1991, he won "Best Newcomer" at the Adult Erotic Gay Video Awards. In 1994, he won "Best Sex Scene" for his scene in Grease Guns. Shaw is HIV+.

In 1991 Shaw collaborated with a New York based fine artist Mark Beard to produce a limited edition book named Aiden. Then it wasn't until 1996, that Shaw wrote his semi-autobiographical novel, Brutal. Also, in 1996, The Bad Press released a collection of his poetry, "If Language at the Same Time Shapes and Distorts Our Ideas and Emotions, How Do We Communicate Love?"

  This was followed by two novels, Boundaries, and Wasted, and then an a best selling autobiographical account of an eight-year period named "My Undoing" (Love in the Thick of Pornography, prostitution, Sex and Love). Along side his work in writing and gay porn, he has produced two albums; Aiden Shaw's "Whatever, and Nina Silvert does Aiden Shaw". In 2006 Shaw completed an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths University of London.  His books include the following:

• Brutal (Millivres Books, 1996) ISBN 1-873741-24-3
• If Language at the Same Time Shapes and Distorts Our Ideas and Emotions, How Do We Communicate Love? (The Bad Press, 1997) ISBN 0-9517233-4-0
• Boundaries (Brighton: Millirowler Group, 1999) ISBN 1-873741-48-0
• Wasted (Brighton: Millivres Prowler Group, 2002) ISBN 1-902852-34-6
• My Undoing: Love in the Thick of Sex, Drugs, Pornography, and Prostitution (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006) ISBN 0-7867-1743-2
• Sordid Truths: Selling My Innocence for a Taste of Stardom (Alyson Books, 2009) ISBN 1-59350-137-4

Film credits for thos inquiring minds are:

• Addiction 1
• Addiction 2
• The Backroom
• Disconnected
• Grease Guns
• Backdoor Studs
• More Catalina Studs
• Palm Springs Paradise
• Roll in the Hay
• Wet and Wild
• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

AIDS Group to File Complaint Against Barebacking Porn Company

The controversial AIDS Healthcare Foundation says it will file a complaint against a Florida-based porn company after one of its actors became HIV-positive. According to a little-noticed item in Florida's public health code, not using a condom during a porn shoot qualifies as a "sanitary nuisance." So says the AHF, at least.

"This is yet another suspected case of HIV infection in the adult film industry. Given the wide reports, and given that Brazzers affirmatively states they do not use condoms--a violation of both state and federal health statutes--it makes sense to investigate them in the hopes of putting an end to further infections," said Michael Weinstein, president of AIDS Healthcare Foundation. "We are filing these complaints with Florida health officials and federal OSHA officials to prompt industry compliance with employee health and safety regulations and to spur proper and thorough public health investigations of this reported incident."

The AHF's action has thrilled the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer, who adores linking HIV-positive people to terms like "sanitary nuisance."

New Initiative To Take HIV Down For TheCount

The U.S. National Institutes Health is set to dole out $70 million in a new push to find ways to eliminate HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from the bodies of people living with the virus, reported Science on July 11.

The money will go to three projects over the next five years. It represents the largest single funding initiative aimed at scrubbing the virus from the human body.

HIV is difficult to root out of all of the body’s tissues. The virus can lie dormant in hard-to-reach places until years later. For this reason, it had long been thought that there might never be a way to completely eradicate the virus from a person who had become infected.

But the case of Timothy Brown, an American who survived a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia and seemingly was cured of the disease as a result, had caused scientists to reconsider. Brown was given marrow from a donor with a natural resistance to HIV. To receive the donated tissue, Brown needed to stop taking his HIV medication. To the astonishment of his doctors, no detectable viral presence appeared in his body following the procedure.

This does not necessarily mean that there are not still particles of the virus lurking in Brown’s body. But if the donor’s natural resistance to HIV was conferred upon Brown in a lasting way, it might not matter: Whatever remaining viral particles are possibly lingering in his system might never become active enough to build up a detectable viral load.

Such a treatment could be a boon to HIV patients who would otherwise rely on expensive medications for decades, living with the possibility of viral breakthrough (when the virus becomes resistant to a previously effective treatment) or long-term side effects from the medication. Cash-strapped governments could also see a savings if fewer people need to be kept supplied with the current standard cocktail of medications.

The medical procedures that Brown underwent to destroy his own bone marrow and replace it with donated tissue are grueling and expensive. Moreover, it is impractical to hope to treat thousands or millions of people by finding suitable donors with the mutation carried by Brown’s donor.

The trick is to figure out a way to achieve a similar result more reliably, cheaply, and easily. That means looking into new approaches to fighting the virus where it lives -- in the body itself. But such approaches must be non-destructive to the body’s systems, as well as thorough in stamping out or suppressing the virus.

One group of collaborators set to be funded by the new grant hopes to develop new medications with such small molecular structures that they can penetrate to the body’s most hard-to-reach niches and wipe out any HIV residing there. The group, based at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is slated to receive more than $6 million per year for five years.

One of the other groups is set to investigate the possibility of engineering suitable marrow tissue for a similar transplant procedure to the one that seemingly cured Brown. The advantage to this approach is that a person’s own stem cells could conceivably be modified to create marrow with the necessary properties, rather than hoping to find donors with naturally occurring mutations.

The third project will also pursue small-molecule treatments, the article said, while also using "immune-based treatments."

"The three collaboratories are using very different but largely complementary approaches," said one of the project’s leaders, Steven Deeks of the University of California, San Francisco. "Since many of us believe a cure will require combination therapy, it is my hope -- as well as the hope of others -- that three groups can merge their work whenever possible."

Some of the ideas on the table have already been shown to have significant therapeutic potential. Researchers in Barcelona used patients’ own cells to create a treatment that reduced the viral load in people living with HIV. Though they said that the reduction in detectable levels of the virus was "significant," researchers cautioned that at this stage the new treatment had not succeeded in dropping patients’ viral loads to the point of not being detectable, as current HIV medication regimens do for many.

"However this is a very important improvement with respect to previous initiatives where with a similar vaccine there was a modest response in 30 percent of the treated patients," a statement from Hospital Clinic in Barcelona, where the clinical trial took place, said last February. and involved two dozen AIDS patients. "No therapeutic vaccine has achieved up to now the same level of response as in this study."

Cells from each patient’s own immune system were used to create tailor-made doses of the vaccine.

The innovation of using patients’ own cells to fight the virus comes at roughly the same time as news of another new approach, the use of specially engineered RNA that suppressed the ability of the virus to replicate itself. Suppression of viral replication is seen as one key component in the search for a vaccine or even a cure. Selectively targeting and destroying infected cells, while leaving healthy cells alone, is another

"The Death Sentence That Has Defined My Life" By Mark Trutwein

I HAVEN’T died on schedule.


Most people don’t think death has a schedule, at least a knowable one. But if you were infected early in the AIDS epidemic, you thought otherwise. At 61, I have now lived half my life with AIDS, my constant companion and distant cousin, the inseparable identity I won’t let define me, the everyday fact and special circumstance that bent the arc of my life in every way.

Although there was not yet a test for the disease, I mark the beginning of my AIDS life in 1982. It’s hard to imagine now the intensity of sexual liberation that gripped gay men then. Oppression was out. Freedom was ours, and we declared it with sex.

But after a tryst with a famous, closeted actor, a huge raincloud of a bruise appeared on my arm. I was hospitalized with a blood disorder that had no apparent explanation. Befuddled doctors guessed a lot, and asked if I drank gin and tonic. I told them it was my father’s drink. Less absurdly, the disorder had been seen among gay men in New York. The phrase “gay plague” was in the air, but no one knew what it was or how anyone got it. It seemed so random then, picking off strangers and acquaintances for no particular reason, but always, you told yourself, for reasons far from you. Then suddenly it wasn’t far from me at all. I left the hospital certain that I had “it.”

As the epidemic grew through the 1980s, all gay men lived with AIDS, whether infected or not. Thirty years ago today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the first cases of the disease. It was a helpless and terrifying time. Medical information grew. We learned about H.I.V. and sexual transmission, but everything was misty and qualified.

Nothing you knew or did mattered. There was no treatment. Every sniffle threatened something worse, every germ was a dagger pointed at your immune system. A good friend stomped out of my house one night, furious I’d served pork for dinner, because pork, everyone knew, could kill you if you had “it.” Even after the test became available, many chose not to know. When my partner and I tested positive, we shrugged. We already knew.

I felt stalked by death. Sex could mean death now, not freedom. More friends became ill, then more. Far too many died. Often their deaths were gruesome. Eulogies were perfected. TV news anchors looked at you every night and calmly pronounced your disease “always fatal.”

Those who took precautions got sick and died. Those who didn’t also got sick and died. Everybody was dying. My death was just a matter of time, and probably very little of it.

Living went on amid all the dying. I had a dream job working for Congress. We accomplished great things. Many colleagues were gay and infected, including my immediate boss. We talked about it a lot, behind closed doors at the end of a day doing the people’s business.

Meanwhile, the government I worked for ignored us. The public feared us. There was talk of quarantine, and endless moral judgment. All we had was each other. Alone, we came together to care for ourselves. In a few short decades a despised minority went from oppression, to resistance, to liberation, to devastation and finally to community. We found community not in the bars but in clinics and hospices and service organizations we created to care for one another, to inform and support one another, to grieve and remember together. It wasn’t happy work, but it was necessary work.

By the early ’90s, my name still had not been called. Initial medications were eked out of a health care system that had been bashed into compliance by angry activists. They were mere BBs hurled at battleships, but they promised more time, time for better drugs, time for more life. My doctor said the only reason not to take the first of them, AZT, was that I’d be taking it every day forever, which didn’t seem a problem then.

So I took them all, endured their side effects and began the Whack-a-Mole phase of living with AIDS. The new AIDS pill might slow the ravaging of my immune system, but it clobbered my liver, so I had to take another pill for that, which put something else at risk ... and on and on.

But nothing then could promise you an average lifespan. My everyday health and my “numbers” — the T-cell counts and helper-suppressor ratios and all the AIDS lingo that became our vocabulary — said I was running out of time. I’d seen too many friends die at their desks. I wanted to live my final days in my beloved San Francisco.

In 1994, my partner and I sat in a gazebo at the Greenbrier Hotel on a hot July night in West Virginia with my honeymooning brother and sister-in-law. Before I could ask, they offered to care for us as we died. The next year I abandoned my dream job and ambition itself, retired to the Bay Area and bought a house a mile from my family to make it easier to manage the messy business of our deaths.

Then, everything changed. Protease inhibitors became available. The “cocktail” was born. You couldn’t beat AIDS but you could fight it to a draw, perhaps indefinitely. For 15 years, death had been ever present. I’d thought about it daily, got familiar with it and planned around it. It had amazed me that people could walk around every day as if they were immune to it. Now I had to adjust to a life I’d been schooled to believe I’d never have. It was one of the hardest and most welcome things I’ve ever had to do.

Still in my 40s, I had to rethink everything if I was going to live. My financial plan wasn’t feasible now. Decades of retirement suddenly seemed not so amiable. I had to think about work. My relationship needed an overhaul because although there was much tying us together, we’d ignored differences that had seemed inconsequential against the sacred obligation to care for each other as we died. Now we faced a lifetime with those differences. Both of us would survive, but “we” didn’t.

Staying alive was now a full-time job in health management. Whack-a-Mole medicine became insanely complicated. And the blessed cocktail came with cursed side effects, including cardiovascular disease.

I had joked that dying of a heart attack at 75 was the least of my worries. By the time I was 51, I’d had two of them, and four angioplasties. The pill-taking was overwhelming. What with the pills taken every 4 or 6 or 12 hours and the pills taken on an empty stomach and the pills taken with food and more and more pills, every infected person I knew carried a beeper to remind him of the day’s next pill-taking event.

My pill regimen became so contradictory it was simply impossible to execute properly. Doctors were just throwing meds at me. There weren’t enough hours in the day for everything to work; the overlapping of starving versus full-stomach regimens, combined with the dosage frequency, couldn’t be accomplished in a 24-hour day, for example, because you couldn’t be both at the same time. Choices had to be made as to what to take, and what not to take. To this day, I still swallow about 25 pills a day.

But the dead don’t have problems, so I was grateful for mine. I was alive and my deathly companion less insistent. AIDS and I have been together for almost 30 years now. My relationship with AIDS is one of my most enduring ones, and has both enriched and beggared my life. It robbed me of friends and loved ones, and with them memories we would have had and repositories of my own history. It ended a career I loved. It cost me a marriage. My intimacy with health care in America has been costly and exhausting. I know these are small prices to pay for life.

What I’ve gained is precious. Above all, the constant companionship of plague has taught me that life is about living, not cheating death. Fighting disease is required and struggling with life inevitable. But I accept the outcomes now, whatever they are. My disease does not make me special, nor does my survival make me courageous.

On that day I walked from the hospital knowing I had “it,” I was given a great gift: the realization that we all dangle from that most delicate of threads and that the only way to live a life is to love it.

I haven’t died on schedule, and I’ve been learning not to live life on one either.

Mark Trautwein is an editor for KQED Public Radio.