Faculty Bibliography

The body's immune system can recover to a large extent, even after it has been ravaged by severe AIDS, according to evidence reported here today by French scientists at the 12th World AIDS Conference. This helps answer a major question that has stymied AIDS researchers. In practical terms, it means that people infected with H.I.V., the AIDS virus, would not need to take drugs to protect against potentially deadly infections that can occur as complications of the disease. Dr. Brigitte Autran, an immunologist at the l'Hopital Pitie-Salpetriere in Paris, said her studies showed ''a tremendous recovery'' of the immune system from AIDS. Dr. Autran's research supports reports from other laboratories that have offered increasingly strong evidence of the potential recovery of an AIDS-damaged immune system

A series of reports about new problems with anti-AIDS drugs and setbacks in vaccine trials left many participants thinking that their best hope against the epidemic is the strategy they have had since it began: prevention. The mood was a sharp contrast to the euphoria at the last AIDS meeting, in Vancouver, British Columbia, two years ago. There, scientists reported that combinations of new drugs, called protease inhibitors, had allowed many people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, to leave their deathbeds, even to return to work. Even when the drugs offered hope, still other speakers said, it is hope beyond the reach of the vast majority of the 34 million people infected with the AIDS virus. Those patients cannot afford the treatment. It can cost about $15,000 to provide the drugs to one person a year, a sum greater than the entire health budget of many a Third World village

A series of reports about new problems with anti-AIDS drugs and setbacks in vaccine trials left many participants thinking their best hope against the epidemic is the strategy they have had since it began -- prevention. The mood was a sharp contrast to the euphoria at the last AIDS meeting, in Vancouver, British Columbia, two years ago. There, scientists reported that combinations of new drugs, called protease inhibitors, had allowed many people infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, to leave their deathbeds, even to return to work. As Dr. Hoosen Coovadia, of Durban, South Africa, explained it, AIDS affects 40 percent of the children he treats in a large black hospital there. Yet, Coovadia, who is chairman of the next World AIDS Conference in 2000 in Durban, said he had never used any anti-HIV drugs. His hospital cannot afford them, he said

The mood was a sharp contrast to the euphoria at the last AIDS meeting, in Vancouver, British Columbia, two years ago. There, scientists reported that combinations of new drugs, called protease inhibitors, had allowed many people infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, to leave their deathbeds, even to return to work. Dr. Hoosen Coovadia, of Durban, South Africa, said AIDS affects 40 percent of the children he treats in a large hospital there. Yet, Coovadia, who is chairman of the next World AIDS Conference in 2000 in Durban, said that he had never used any anti-HIV drugs. His hospital cannot afford them, he said. Reports like these lead to the conclusion that the best hope for easing the epidemic is still prevention, speakers said. Yet 'over 100 times more money is being spent on therapeutics now than on the development of prevention technologies,' said Dr. Catherine Hankins, an epidemiologist at Montreal General Hospital in Canada. Among them are chemicals that could be inserted into the vagina before sexual intercourse to kill HIV. Hankins left the meeting saying she did not feel 'terribly optimistic.'

Hopes for a vaccine against AIDS were set back today at the 12th World AIDS Conference here when researchers reported that a vaccine made from a weakened simian virus and injected into monkeys had caused the disease it was designed to prevent. Dr. (Anthony S.) Fauci said the new findings showed that he and other Federal officials were correct in urging caution in testing vaccines made from artificially weakened, or attenuated, AIDS virus. More than 300 doctors in the United States and elsewhere have pleaded with the United States Food and Drug Administration to let them become human guinea pigs for a similar experimental vaccine made from a weakened H.I.V. The Therion Biologics Corporation of Cambridge, Mass., is trying to develop such a human AIDS vaccine. In 1993 Dr. (Ruth) Ruprecht began her experiments by injecting nine newborn monkeys with the weakened S.I.V. vaccine developed by Dr. Ronald Desrosiers of the New England Primate Center in Southboro, Mass. Although she had reported earlier that some of these monkeys became ill, today she said, ''we have some rather sobering news'' that all newborn monkeys given the vaccine are ill or dead. Of the nine newborn monkeys injected with the weakened S.I.V., six have developed simian AIDS and five of them have died. The remaining three monkeys are ill or have immunological abnormalities related to simian AIDS

Pleas for national leaders to muster the political courage to carry out strong prevention programs to stop the global epidemic of AIDS were sounded at the opening of the 12th World AIDS Conference on Sunday. The world is facing a runaway epidemic and 'it is time to embrace a new realism and a new urgency in our efforts' to overcome complacency about the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, Dr. Peter Piot, the head of the United Nations AIDS program, said at the conference

In a new effort to slow the transmission of AIDS from mothers to their babies, the United Nations is starting a pilot program to treat 30,000 pregnant women infected with H.I.V. in 11 countries where the infection is spreading rapidly, United Nations officials said at the 12th World AIDS Conference here today. The program, which will focus on developing nations, mainly in Africa, will offer testing to pregnant women and short-term therapy with the drug AZT during late pregnancy and delivery. Several studies have shown that short-term AZT therapy can sharply reduce the risk of a woman's transmitting H.I.V. to her baby. Each year an estimated two million H.I.V.-infected women worldwide become pregnant, officials of the United Nations AIDS program said. About 680,000 babies were born with AIDS last year, thrusting mother-to-child transmission to center stage at the conference. But as the United Nations program was announced at a news conference, Actup-Paris, a French advocacy group, strongly attacked it as unethical. Protesters argued that the program was far too limited, because it will provide treatment to women only during pregnancy and not afterward. They also criticized organizers for not addressing the fate of the children who will be born free of H.I.V. but whose mothers may soon die of AIDS. About 1.6 million children worldwide lost their mothers to the disease in 1997

Tuesday, [David Ho], [Roberto Siliciano] and others said that they have gone back to the drawing board to map new strategies to eliminate the latent reservoir. In pursuing that goal, scientists are moving into uncharted waters. Although vaccines can prevent viral infections, drugs do not cure any viral disease the way antibiotics can cure some bacterial infections. When a person gets over a viral infection, recovery is due to the body's natural immune defenses. In the case of HIV, one strategy is to find new drugs to rid the body of the last cell of the reservoir. Another is to use one drug to flush HIV out of hiding so that another drug might kill the escaping virus. Normally, young uninfected CD4 cells emerge from the thymus gland in the chest and circulate throughout the body in its lymph system. When such cells meet a foreign invader like HIV, they turn into a different cell (known as a lymphoblast) and begin to proliferate. HIV kills many CD4 cells. But some survive in a resting state in which HIV does not replicate unless something stimulates it to do so

The scourge of AIDS now rivals the greatest epidemics of history, particularly in areas of Africa where as many as one in four adults has the virus, according to a U.N. report issued Tuesday. In the first country-by-country analysis of the disease, the United Nations said that in the past year 30 million people worldwide were infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, and that 21 million were in Africa. Countries south of the Sahara account for the world's 21 highest rates of HIV among adults ages 15 to 49, the most sexually active segment of the population. In 13 of those countries, HIV has infected at least 10 percent of adults, and in Botswana and Zimbabwe, a quarter of adults are infected, a rate that even an expert described as 'shocking.'