Faculty Bibliography

If black America were a country, it would rank 16th in the world in the number of people living with the AIDS virus, the Black AIDS Institute, an advocacy group, reported Tuesday. Dr. Helene Gayle, president of CARE and a former director of H.I.V. prevention efforts at the disease control centers, told reporters on Tuesday that the United States needed to devote more resources to care for people with sexually transmitted diseases

The findings confirm that H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, has its greatest effect among gay and bisexual men of all races (53 percent of all new infections) and among African-American men and women

The findings confirm that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has its greatest effect among gay and bisexual men of all races (53 percent of all new infections) and among African-American men and women.

[...] researchers in a number of countries are conducting trials and planning others to test the unproven strategy that a daily pill, or a combination of drugs, can prevent H.I.V. By mid-2009, more people will be enrolled in such trials than in all of those for H.I.V. vaccines and microbicides, the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition said in a report issued here on Sunday at the start of the 17th International AIDS Conference

Dr. Kevin Fenton, who directs HIV- prevention efforts at the agency, said, 'CDC's new incidence estimates reveal that the HIV epidemic is and has been worse than previously known.' A separate historical trend analysis published as part of the study suggests that the number of new infections was probably never as low as the earlier estimate of 40,000 and that it has been roughly stable over all since the late 1990s. Dr. Philip Alcabes, an epidemiologist at Hunter College in New York, raised questions about the validity of the findings. If they are true, Alcabes said in a statement, the agency has undercounted new HIV infections by about 15,000 per year for about 15 years. 'Therefore, there are roughly 225,000 more people living with HIV in the U.S. than previously suspected,' he said. 'The previous estimate was 1 million to 1.1 million.' A number of leading health experts have criticized the agency for not releasing the information earlier. On Nov. 21, CDC officials told AIDS advocacy groups and reporters that the data would be released soon. In an editorial on June 21, The Lancet, an internationally prestigious journal published in London, severely criticized the disease centers for failing to release the information and said, 'U.S. efforts to prevent HIV have failed dismally.'

The findings confirm that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has its greatest effect among gay and bisexual men of all races (53 percent of all new infections) and among black American men and women. [Julie Gerberding] said the new findings were 'unacceptable,' adding that new efforts must be made to lower the infection rates. 'We are not effectively reaching men who have sex with men and African-Americans to lower their risk,' she said. CDC officials said the revised figure did not necessarily represent an increase in the number of new infections but reflected the ability of a new testing method to more precisely measure HIV incidence and secure a better understanding of the epidemic

An even more serious form, known as XDR-TB for extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis, does not respond to any of the fluoroquinolone class and to at least one of three second-line drugs (amikacin, capreomycin and kanamycin) that are given by injection. There are about 450 laboratories in the world now that can detect drug-resistant tuberculosis, although many are not performing to capacity, Dr. Mario C. Raviglione, who directs the health agency's tuberculosis department in Geneva, said in a telephone interview. Under the plan, all laboratories would perform 1.8 million cultures for tuberculosis in 2007 and 2.2 million in 2008, up from the estimated 200,000 in 2006. The laboratories would perform 750,000 drug susceptibility tests in 2007 and 900,000 in 2008, up from 75,000 in 2005

The outbreak resembles one last year that was linked to a different manufacturer's lens solution and a different microbe. In both instances, the cornea, the eye's transparent outer covering, is at risk. But why two different microbes caused the outbreaks is not known. ''It is beyond comprehension,'' said Dr. Dan B. Jones, the chairman of ophthalmology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who detected a case of acanthamoeba keratitis, which is behind the current outbreak, on Friday. Acanthamoeba infections have been reported in many countries. Dr. Jones's team is credited for first identifying a corneal infection from acanthamoeba in the United States, in a rancher who was injured in an accident in Texas in 1973. That case did not involve contact lenses: while the rancher was working in a field, a piece of wire and hay hit his eye

''This technique has a big potential in the vascular surgical field,'' said Dr. Toshiharu Shinoka, who directs pediatric cardiovascular surgery at Yale and who plans to conduct studies with Cytograft on the new vessel. He called the technique an advance over one he used in operations on children in Japan, in which vessels were grown from cells on a scaffold that then degraded and was absorbed into the body. Doctors not connected with the company agreed on the importance of the new technique. ''A potential benefit may be for infants and children with congenital heart defects,'' said Dr. Deepak Srivastava, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease at the University of California, San Francisco. Unlike grafts from cadavers, he added, ''the Cytograft vessels should be able to grow as the child does.'' Dr. Sergio A. Garrido, a vascular surgeon in Buenos Aires, said he implanted the Cytograft vessels in the forearm or upper arm under general anesthesia, in a different area from the malfunctioning shunt. The procedure took 60 to 90 minutes. Through surgical gloves, the Cytograft vessel, 5 1/2 to 11 * inches long, felt a little more delicate than a regular vein, he said