Faculty Bibliography

That was the case in Tugela Ferry, a rural town in KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa, when an outbreak of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis -- XDR-TB for short -- killed 52 of its 53 victims, all of whom were also infected with H.I.V. The outbreak was detected in 2005, but it did not receive international attention until it was reported at the international AIDS meeting in Toronto last August. Using statistics from recent years, Dr. [Karin Weyer] said her team estimated that 6,000 new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis occurred in South Africa each year and that the rate of treatment failure was about 10 percent. Assuming that most failures were due to the extremely drug-resistant form, a conservative estimate is 600 cases of XDR-TB in her country each year, Dr. Weyer said. The outbreak is not limited to Africa. Dr. Paul Nunn, a tuberculosis expert at the World Health Organization, told the meeting here that one or more cases of XDR-TB had been found in at least 28 countries. Extrapolating from data about the multidrug-resistant form of tuberculosis, Dr. Nunn estimated that two-thirds of the XDR-TB cases were from China, India and Russia

An ultrasound revealed a deep venous thrombosis, a blood clot, in the lower portion of his left leg. He was treated with anticoagulant medication, which he will take for several months, and he returned to work. Although blood clots in the leg can be dangerous if left untreated, experts say most are successfully treated with the anticoagulant drugs that the White House says [Dick Cheney] is now receiving. In September 2005, Cheney underwent surgery to repair aneurysms, bulges in the arteries that can spawn dangerous blood clots, behind both knees. Doctors implanted devices known as stent-grafts in each of Cheney's legs. The blood clot that was discovered in Cheney's leg on Monday was in a vein, not an artery, and several independent experts said there was most likely no connection between it and the 2005 surgery. Dr. Cameron Akbari, a senior vascular surgeon at Washington Hospital Center in the District of Columbia, said Cheney's history of heart disease put him at only 'a very slightly increased risk' of developing a deep venous thrombosis

An ultrasound revealed a deep venous thrombosis, a blood clot, in the lower part of his left leg. He was treated with anticoagulant medication, which he will take for several months, and he returned to work. Although blood clots in the leg can be dangerous if left untreated, experts say most are successfully treated with the anticoagulant drugs that the White House says Mr. [Dick Cheney] is now receiving. The blood clot that was discovered in Mr. Cheney's leg on Monday was in a vein, not an artery, and several independent experts said there was most likely no connection between it and the 2005 surgery. Dr. Cameron Akbari, a senior vascular surgeon at Washington Hospital Center in the District of Columbia, said Mr. Cheney's history of heart disease put him at only ''a very slightly increased risk'' of developing a deep venous thrombosis. Vice President Dick Cheney speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars yesterday. Mr. Cheney experienced discomfort in a leg after the speech. (Photo by Chris Kleponis/Bloomberg News)

An ultrasound revealed a deep venous thrombosis, a blood clot, in the lower portion of his left leg. He was treated with anti- coagulant medication, which he will take for several months, and he returned to work. Although blood clots in the leg can be dangerous if left untreated, experts say most are successfully treated with the anti-coagulant drugs that the White House says [Dick Cheney] is now receiving. In September 2005, Cheney underwent surgery to repair aneurysms, bulges in the arteries that can spawn dangerous blood clots, behind both knees. Doctors implanted devices known as stent-grafts in each of Cheney's legs. The blood clot that was discovered in Cheney's leg on Monday was in a vein, not an artery, and several independent experts said there was most likely no connection between it and the 2005 surgery. Dr. Cameron Akbari, a senior vascular surgeon at Washington Hospital Center in the District of Columbia, said Cheney's history of heart disease put him at only 'a very slightly increased risk' of developing a deep venous thrombosis

The two drugs, which could be approved for marketing this year, would add two new classes of drugs to the four that are available to battle HIV, the AIDS virus. That would be especially important to tens of thousands of U.S. patients whose treatment is failing because their virus has become resistant to drugs already in use. While there are now 20 approved drugs to treat HIV and AIDS, there are only four different mechanisms by which the drugs work. In many patients, the rapidly replicating virus evolves resistance to one or more drugs, usually because patients don't take their drugs on time as prescribed

Merck's drug works by inhibiting the action of integrase, an enzyme produced by the virus that incorporates the virus' genetic material into the DNA of a patient's immune cell. Once incorporated, the viral DNA commandeers the cell to make more copies of the virus. Pfizer's drug works by blocking a portal on human immune system cells that HIV uses to enter and infect the cell. It would be the first drug for AIDS that works by blocking a protein that is part of the human body rather than something in the virus. About 85 percent of newly infected patients have a virus that uses CCR5 while only about half of patients who have a resistant virus use CCR5. There has been some concern that blocking CCR5 would encourage the development of viruses that use the alternative portal -- and those viruses seem to be associated with worse outcomes

The combination - taking one inexpensive antibiotic pill each day and sleeping under an insecticide-treated mosquito net - reduced the incidence of malaria by 97 percent compared with a control group, Dr. Anne Gasasira, an AIDS researcher at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, said Wednesday at a medical conference in Los Angeles. She said the findings had already changed medical practice in Uganda. But scientists said they had not yet determined whether the treatment would be as effective in HIV-negative children with malaria

The combination - taking one inexpensive antibiotic pill each day and sleeping under an insecticide-treated mosquito net - reduced the incidence of malaria by 97 percent compared with a control group, Dr. Anne Gasasira, an AIDS researcher at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, said Wednesday at a medical conference in Los Angeles. She said the findings had already changed medical practice in Uganda

LOS ANGELES -- A simple, inexpensive and surprisingly powerful combination of treatments all but wiped out malaria in a group of HIV-positive children in a study in Uganda, scientists are reporting. The combination -- taking one inexpensive antibiotic pill each day and sleeping under an insecticide-treated mosquito net -- reduced the incidence of malaria by 97 percent compared with a control group, Dr. Anne Gasasira, an AIDS researcher at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, said at a conference here Wednesday

The two drugs, which could be approved for marketing this year, would add two new classes of drugs to the four that are available to battle HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. That would be especially important to patients whose treatment is failing because their strain of virus has become resistant to drugs already in use. 'This is really a remarkable development in the field,' Dr. John Mellors of the University of Pittsburgh said at a news conference Tuesday at the 14th Annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Los Angeles. Pfizer's drug works by blocking a portal on human immune system cells that HIV uses to enter and infect the cell. It would be the first AIDS drug that works by blocking a protein that is part of the human body rather than something in the virus. About 85 percent of newly infected patients have a virus that uses CCR5, while only about half of patients who have a resistant virus use CCR5. There has been some concern that blocking CCR5 would encourage the development of viruses that use the alternative portal