viral infection Archives - MyMedicPlus https://www.mymedicplus.com/blog/tag/viral-infection/ One Blog Daily For Health And Fitness Tue, 30 Mar 2021 19:12:18 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 WHO launches social media Aids awareness campaign targeting African youth https://www.mymedicplus.com/blog/who-launches-social-media-aids-awareness-campaign-targeting-african-youth/ Sat, 30 Nov 2019 15:15:30 +0000 http://www.mymedicplus.com/news/?p=3149 The post WHO launches social media Aids awareness campaign targeting African youth appeared first on MyMedicPlus.

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NAIROBI, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) — As the 31st World AIDS Day approaches on December 1, the World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday launched a social media campaign to raise awareness about HIV and Aids among African youth amid their vulnerability to the disease.

Senior officials said the campaign dubbed  The Tea On HIV aims to reach out to one million adolescents and youth in Africa with information on how they can prevent themselves from contracting HIV and how to live positively with it.

“This social media campaign aims to equip young Africans with the right information to start breaking the barriers that prevent them from getting support,” said Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa.

Nearly 1.5 million out of the 1.6 million adolescents living with HIV globally by 2018 were in the Sub-Saharan African region, according to the data from WHO.

Moeti said that investment in youth-friendly reproductive health services are key to revitalize war against HIV and Aids in Africa that accounts for more than 70 percent of 30 million people living with the disease globally.

According to the UNAIDS data, only one in three young people globally has comprehensive knowledge about HIV and seven out of 10 young women(aged 15-24 years) in sub-Saharan Africa do not have comprehensive knowledge about HIV.

Frank Lule, medical officer HIV/Aids treatment at WHO Regional Office for Africa, said that 4 out of 10 new HIV infections are concentrated in the 15 to 24 years age bracket in the continent thanks to vulnerabilities linked to poverty and limited information about the disease.

“There has been inadequate awareness about HIV and Aids among adolescents and youth in this region and the new campaign will ensure they have access to knowledge on prevention and management of the disease,” said Lule.

He said that the social media-fueled HIV and Aids awareness campaign will provide a platform for African youth to share knowledge, experience and best practices geared towards the elimination of the disease by 2030.

Catherine Ngugi, head of programs at Kenya’s National Aids and STIs Control Program (NASCOP), said that robust interventions that include awareness campaigns and economic empowerment is key to reduce HIV infections among the youth.

“We need to look at the other drivers of higher infections among the youth that include lack of access to education, quality health care and jobs,” said Ngugi.

She said that Kenya has developed youth-friendly HIV and Aids interventions as government data indicate that this demographic accounted for more than 51 percent of new infections in the recent past.

Doreen Moraa, a 27-year-old Kenyan campaigner living with HIV, said that leveraging on social media platforms is key to influence behavior change among youth at risk of contracting the Aids virus.

“On my Facebook page, I have declared: I am HIV-positive. I am not sick. I am not sad. I am not dying. I am just a fabulous host to a tiny virus.” said Moraa in Nairobi.

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]]> ‘Like insects in amber’: ART ‘freezes’ latent HIV reservoir https://www.mymedicplus.com/blog/like-insects-in-amber-art-freezes-latent-hiv-reservoir/ Tue, 22 Oct 2019 06:52:47 +0000 http://www.mymedicplus.com/news/?p=2342 The post ‘Like insects in amber’: ART ‘freezes’ latent HIV reservoir appeared first on MyMedicPlus.

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The latent HIV reservoir is mostly formed soon after the initiation of treatment, suggesting that ART indirectly affects the host environment to favor the establishment of latently infected long-lived cells, researchers reported in Science Translational Medicine.

“These researchers are proposing that the virus cycles in and out of the reservoir, and that it is the introduction of antiretroviral therapy that freezes the reservoir viruses in place, like insects in amber,” Rowena Johnston, PhD, vice president and director of research at amfAR, told Infectious Disease News.

While people with HIV are on ART, HIV can persist in resting CD4+ T cells as a latent reservoir, despite the effective suppression of HIV-1 replication. Even with early ART initiation, the reservoir can form, and discontinuation of ART usually results in the “rapid rebound of virus, indicating that although therapy suppresses viral replication, HIV-1 is able to persist in an infectious state for years,” Melissa-Rose Abrahams, MSc(Med), PhD, a research officer in the division of medical virology at the University of Cape Town’s Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, and colleagues wrote.

However, much is still unknown about the formation of the HIV-1 latent reservoir, inhibiting progress toward a cure. Understanding when it forms may inform future research.

Abrahams and colleagues studied blood samples from nine women with HIV receiving ART who participated in the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) 002 cohort. The women were originally enrolled into the cohort during acute/primary HIV-1 infection.

“It’s refreshing to see these researchers look at an understudied population — namely women — and in the region of the world most affected by HIV,” said Johnston, who was not involved in the study. “Even though more than half of all people in the world living with HIV are women, only a small fraction are represented in HIV cure research.”

According to the study, the researchers compared sequences of replication-competent viruses from resting peripheral CD4+ T cells with viral sequences circulating in blood that was collected longitudinally prior to therapy.

Abrahams and colleagues assessed the genetic makeup the replicating viruses found right before ART initiation and the viruses induced from the post-therapy latent reservoir. They reported that, on average, 71% of the post-therapy viruses were genetically similar to the pretreatment viruses.

“A reservoir of HIV is formed within days of initial infection, and this reservoir cannot be cleared by antiretroviral therapy,” Johnston noted. “What is as yet unknown is whether that virus cycles in and out of the reservoir, or whether it enters the reservoir and stays for the duration of the person’s life.”

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