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Due to the inordinate delay in purchase of the HIV rapid test kits, it is feared that Punjab may reach epidemic proportions of the disease.

The percentagea of AIDS cases has increased by 57pc in Pakistan during the last eight years with a death rate of 369pc.

Among the provinces, Punj

ab is at its top with a major threat of an epidemic with 50pc of the total 36,902 HIV/AIDS cases across the country, followed by Sindh with 43pc, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 5pc and Balochistan 2pc. The estimated number of unregistered HIV cases in Pakistan was 165,000, according to a report of the National AIDS Control Programme, a copy of which is available with Dawn.

Pakistan is also one of the few countries in the World Health Organisation Eastern Mediterranean Region where HIV infections were increasing at an alarming rate.

In Punjab, 2,805 registered AIDS patients were reported in DG Khan DHQ Hospital, 2,548 in Mayo Hospital Lahore, 2,363 in Allied Hospital Faisalabad, 2,058 in Aziz Bhatti Shaheed Hospital Gujrat, 1,983 in Jinnah Hospital Lahore, 1,425 Civil Hospital Multan and 1,015 Services Hospital Lahore.

The province also housed 26 of the total 44 HIV treatment centres established across Pakistan. The total number of registered AIDS patients was recently complied by these centres in Punjab.

An official told Dawn that despite the serious situation the Punjab government’s failure to procure 100,000 rapid diagnostic kits for the screening of patients had increased the risks of an epidemic of the disease across the province. He said another major drawback of the Punjab Aids Control Programme (PACP) has been the discrepancy in the reported data of HIV/AIDS patients.

Shockingly, he claimed, that out of the total 18,556 registered patients in Punjab, the programme was providing treatment to 9,400 only. The reason was said to be lack of transparency in the reporting mechanism pertaining to the AIDS patients, he stated.

Similarly, the programme authorities were supposed to prepare and submit a new PC-I to set new targets to curtail the impact of the disease. Upon failure to submitting the new PC-I, the planning and development department extended the previous programme to June 2020.

According to the previous PC-I, the programme was to establish treatment centres in all 36 districts of Punjab by June 2019.

The official further said the programme had also constantly ignored the top five key populations living with HIV/AIDS for their screening and treatment. These included the injection drug users, transgender, male and female sex workers, and truck and bus drivers. It has mainly been focusing on the general population rather than underlining these five core groups that were one of the major reasons behind a surge in the reported cases, he said.

PACP Director Dr Munir Malik claimed that the dubious/double data entry of the AIDS patients in Punjab was caused by a faulty mechanism. “It is unfortunate that many dashboards are working in Punjab for data entry/reporting of the AIDS cases,” he added.

“The programme feels that reporting of such a large number of AIDS cases (18,556) could be the result of duplication of already registered patients during data entry by various dashboards,” Dr Malik claimed.

He said that the national and provincial officials associated with the programme had decided to review the data entry system by introducing biometric scanning and a designated dashboard to avoid duplication.

“The process of procurement of diagnostic kits is under way and I hope it is done till the end of this month,” he added.

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(Natural News) Did you know that, just prior to the HIV and AIDS epidemic that swept the American homosexual population during the early 1980s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had conducted a hepatitis B vaccine experiment that’s believed to have triggered it?

Between the years of 1978 and 1981, the CDC specifically targeted homosexual men living in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles – three major cities where HIV and AIDS seemingly appeared out of nowhere – with hepatitis B vaccines that were manufactured with infected blood.

This blood was then injected into chimpanzees that were known to be infected with the cancer-causing simian virus 40, also known as SV40.

As you may recall, SV40 is the same virus that was identified in polio vaccines administered during the 1950s, which could explain the meteoric rise in cancer we’re now seeing roughly 70 years later.

Prior to the CDC’s administering of these hepatitis B vaccines among homosexual populations, HIV and AIDS didn’t even exist in the United States. But after this little experiment, the details of which remain largely under wraps, HIV and AIDS began to spread like wildfire.

By the time the CDC’s hepatitis B experiment reached its conclusion in 1981, the CDC actually declared AIDS to be an epidemic. Just one year prior, however, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published a report proclaiming the CDC’s AIDS-tainted hepatitis B vaccine to be “safe and incidence of side effects low,” with an alleged 96 percent success rate.

How a vaccine that almost immediately resulted in some 20 percent of homosexual men living in Manhattan contracting HIV in 1980 – this figure doubled to 40 percent by 1984 – could be considered “safe and incidence of side effects low” is truly mind-boggling. But this is what was declared at the time, and the rest is history.

For more related news about the CDC, be sure to check out CDC.news.

Did the CIA create HIV 10 years before the CDC began administering it in vaccines?
This type of human medical experimentation is really nothing new for our country. In fact, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is said to have intentionally created HIV as far back as 1970 when Dr. Donald MacArthur, the then-Deputy Director for Research and Technology at the Department of Defense, requested $10 million from Congress to develop a synthetic biological agent with resistance “to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.”

Though it hasn’t technically been proven that the CIA is responsible for HIV, and thus AIDS, we know that CIA-supervised mycoplasma research that took place at Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division had been working on creating a synthetic immunosuppressive agent, which very likely turned out to be HIV.

One year later in 1971, then-President Richard Nixon actually converted Fort Detrick from an “offensive biowarfare laboratory” into the Frederick Cancer Research and Development Center, which today is known as the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at Frederick.

The handling of HIV appears to have then transferred hands to the CDC, which plotted to set it loose in many of America’s major cities in order to create a new public health crisis, specifically within the homosexual community.

Little-known PBS interview that was never aired linked HIV to Merck’s polio vaccine, which contained AIDS-causing SV40

Several years after the CDC declared AIDS to be an epidemic, medical historian Edward Shorter and Dr. Maurice Hilleman, the foremost vaccine developer at Merck at the time, appeared on PBS to discuss SV40 contamination in Merck’s polio vaccine.

Though this 1987 interview never actually aired, for reasons you’re about to learn, it was submitted to the Library of Congress making it available for access. In 2011, it was also uploaded to YouTube, though it has since been pulled “due to a copyright claim by Leonard G. Horowitz.”

Its contents, however, are now widely known by those who’ve been following this scandal, revealing that SV40 is not just associated with cancer, but also with AIDS. According to Dr. Hilleman, SV40 itself could be the source of AIDS, as he once declared, “I didn’t know we were importing AIDS” in reference to Merck’s SV40-contaminated polio vaccines.

Suffice it to say that HIV and AIDS, as well as other novel diseases that originated in primates, were delivered to human populations intentionally through the administration of vaccines. Since AIDS specifically can be traced to these CDC hepatitis B vaccine experiments, it’s safe to say that our own government is directly responsible for an untold number of injuries and deaths caused by diseases that were laced into government-mandated vaccines.

“Efforts to obtain this information have been rebuffed invoking the ‘confidential’ nature of the experiment to deny access,” the group goes on to explain, suggesting that folks who are interested in this scandal further investigate the works of Dr. Alan Cantwell, MD, and the books Gay Vaccine Experiments and the American (Not African) Origin of AIDS and The Virus Cancer Program.

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Ever since the AIDS epidemic erupted nearly 40 years ago, researchers have tried to make a vaccine.

The efforts typically end up like this: “Failure Of Latest HIV Vaccine Test: A ‘Huge Disappointment.’ “

Now researchers have come up with a new blueprint.

The method behind their potential vaccine mimics a rare process detected in the immune systems of some people with HIV — a process the reduces the amount of virus in the body.

The team from Duke and Harvard behind the work, which appears this month in the journal Science, says there is still a long road ahead before an actual vaccine is ready for large-scale field trials. But scientists in the field are more optimistic than they’ve been for some time.

“For the first 20 years after the virus was discovered, the field tried to make a vaccine using the techniques that all the successful measles, mumps, rubella, polio vaccines had been made with in the past. And none of those worked,” says Barton Haynes, director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute and a lead author of the new research. But with a virus that’s constantly mutating to evade the immune system, the antibodies generated weren’t strong enough to fight it off.

But in about 20% of people who get infected with HIV, their immune systems will make special proteins called “broadly neutralizing antibodies.” These antibodies live up to their name by wiping out many different strains of HIV by attacking the parts of the virus that stay constant, even as it evolves.

These proteins tend to develop several years after infection and can stop the virus from replicating for a while — although they don’t cure people of HIV because there’s always a reservoir of the virus hiding out in cells where antibodies can’t reach them.

But earlier tests in animals showed a powerful way forward: When they were infused with these antibodies before exposure to HIV, infections were prevented.

But there was a problem: The protection was short-lived.

In the new research, Haynes and his colleagues use computer modeling and lab testing on mice and monkeys to figure out how to train an immune system that’s not been compromised by HIV to create these special antibodies — and then continue to make new, stronger generations.

“We show a new way to design the HIV vaccine to guide the broadly neutralizing antibodies to go down paths they rarely go down on their own,” Haynes says. The vaccine would also train the immune system to make these antibodies in months instead of the natural timetable of years after human exposure to the virus.

The approach looks promising to Rowena Johnston, research director at the nonprofit Foundation for AIDS Research, or amfAR, who was not involved with the study. “Nature is the best engineer when it comes to working out what our immune system should do,” she says.

A vaccine based on these antibodies also has the potential to be far more effective than others in development. There currently are three HIV vaccine candidates in the final stages of human testing, and they’ll be considered successful if they protect just half the exposed population from getting HIV. The benefit of this new method is that because it’s introducing more powerful antibodies than the other vaccine candidates, it could lead to a vaccine that is 80-90% effective, says Dr. John Mascola, director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), who was not involved with the study.

Haynes’ team is a third of the way through developing several of these antibodies, and they’ll need more types to make an effective vaccine, something they say they’re confident they’ll be able to do.

Mascola estimates that it will take at least another five years for an HIV vaccine based on this research to get to large-scale clinical trials.

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Growing up, Linos Vandekerckhove loved biology, so it seemed an obvious choice to go to medical school. After two years of practising internal medicine, in 2001 he had a chance to spend a year in South Africa.

“Here I was, in the eye of the storm, where most days one person would come to the clinic and die within 48 hours from an AIDS-related illness,” he said.

He returned to his native Belgium shaken. “It was really shocking to me, because in Europe treatment was readily available, so suddenly I felt like some people pay a very high price.”

Not wanting to plunge back into a hospital setting, he opted to work for a few days a week in an HIV virology laboratory. After getting his PhD, he wanted to continue researching HIV, so he joined the Ghent University Hospital in Belgium. After a few years of working with patients, he finally had more time to spend on research. In 2009, he started his own laboratory, the HIV Cure Research Center Ghent, and a year later he spent five months in San Francisco, United States of America, to familiarize himself with research on a cure.

“The sabbatical helped me gain momentum,” he explained. His research laboratory now employs 20 people.

Recently, his team completed a study with 11 people living with HIV. It involved pausing antiretroviral therapy so that scientists could observe viral rebound.

“An ethics committee had to validate the study and, of course, we held a patient forum to analyse the stress factors associated with taking people off treatment and the subsequent tests on them,” Mr Vandekerckhove said. His team made sure that the eight to nine procedures would be minimally invasive and carried out in a day, so that the volunteers could return to work after two days. To minimize any further disruption, technical assistants went to each person’s home to regularly gather blood samples.

“We wanted to involve the volunteers as much as possible and show our support from A to Z,” he said.

Two patterns surfaced from the study. Viral rebound, which took 15–36 days, occurs randomly. The team found more than 200 independent rebound events, from the gut to the lymph nodes to “just about everywhere where immune cells are present.”

Mr Vandekerckhove’s team also found that, depending on where the virus rebounded in a part of the body, the virus had evolved with its own individual make-up, like a barcode or a fingerprint. The researchers found different viruses, showing that they are not all the same single virus that has emerged from a reservoir, but rather multiple re-emergent events.

“We analysed 30 barcodes per cell type and about 400 barcodes per person,” he said.

That’s when they asked for help from virologists and statisticians.

“Our study revealed that having a medicine that would only target the lymph nodes is wrong. What this shows is that you need to focus on many organs, not just one,” Mr Vandekerckhove said.

UNAIDS Science Adviser Peter Godfrey-Faussett congratulated the HIV Cure Research Center Ghent. “Such detailed work advances our understanding of reservoirs where HIV “hides” while treatment suppresses the virus in the blood,” he said.

In his opinion, the research highlights the many challenges of the virus, since HIV can rebound from a wide range of reservoirs. “This is why a clear understanding of the nature of the reservoirs is so important to find a cure.”

Mr Vandekerckhove remains very positive, pointing to how gene therapy used to be science fiction but is now a reality.

“We need to bring the world of research to the world of patients,” he said. In his mind, a cure is one of the many facets of HIV that we cannot overlook.

Fellow Belgian Jonathan Bossaer couldn’t agree more. Ten years ago, he became very ill in South Africa and soon found out he had contracted HIV. After many years of feeling lost, a friend’s death made him realize he had to change.

“I was able to free myself of the frustration and shame that I had been living with for almost eight years and let go,” Mr Bossaer said. He founded a charity to raise awareness about HIV stigma. “Positively Alive has three main objectives: educate people about HIV, normalize HIV and help end HIV by raising funds,” he explained.

Half the funds go to a South African orphanage and the other half to Mr Vandekerckhove’s research centre. “Ending the HIV and AIDS epidemic is an enormous challenge and research for a cure and a vaccine needs our full support,” he said.

Pausing a bit, Mr Bossaer said, “The fight is far from over, but we are on the right path.”

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