Faculty Bibliography

At the same time, the prevalence of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, among young people has declined in eight countries in Africa, showing that prevention efforts can work, UN officials said Tuesday. 'Even limited resources can give high returns when investments are focused on reaching people most at risk and adapted to changing national epidemics, said Dr. Paul De Lay, of the international body's AIDS program Unaids. Nevertheless, 'these estimates are amongst the most robust for any disease of global public health importance,' said Dr. Kevin De Cock, the World Health Organization's chief AIDS official. The global death total would be higher without the efforts undertaken in recent years to provide anti-retroviral therapy to hundreds of thousands of AIDS patients in poor countries, De Cock said. Still, he said, such drug therapy has not reached enough poor people to match the degree of decline in death rates seen in wealthy countries

The four other Lasker winners are Dr. Elizabeth H. Blackburn, 57, of the University of California at San Francisco; Dr. Carol W. Greider, 45, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Dr. Jack W. Szostak, 53, of Harvard Medical School; and Dr. Joseph Gall, 78, of the Department of Embryology at the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore

South Africa has the largest number of H.I.V.-infected people in the world. Its president, Thabo Mbeki, has continually expressed skepticism that H.I.V. causes AIDS, and the country has questioned antiretroviral treatment and delayed providing it to pregnant women and AIDS patients. Other speakers urged training more nurses and health workers in poor countries to deliver the antiretroviral drugs and preventive measures needed to stop the AIDS epidemic. The many international programs that are scaling up efforts to deliver antiretroviral drugs to poor people cannot succeed without large numbers of health workers to monitor the care of AIDS patients. As the conference speakers delivered their remarks, hundreds of Africans, Asians and people from around the world began dismantling the global village created here to promote discussion of H.I.V. One exhibit, called ''Dress Up Against AIDS,'' included 10 dresses by Adriana Bertini, a Brazilian artist, made from thousands of condoms. Nearby were women from the Masaka district of Uganda who displayed their crafts, including mats, straw bowls and drums. In another booth, Kenyan workers showed off sandals and beaded necklaces. In others, attendants handed out pamphlets on programs for H.I.V. and AIDS

Both men praised the Bush administration's program, Pepfar, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a five-year, $15 billion program that serves 16 countries, 13 of them in Africa. One part of the program aims to help provide pregnant women with the pills to have healthy babies. For example, Mr. [Bill Gates] said, a simple drug therapy can help most infected mothers avoid passing the AIDS virus to newborns. But, in part because of stigma, poor countries are unable to provide that treatment for an overwhelming majority of pregnant women. As for stigma, Mr. [Bill Clinton] cited China's experience in reversing its position on AIDS. ''Initially, the Chinese were in denial about AIDS, and then they decided they wouldn't be, and they turned on a dime,'' he said

Mr. [Tony Snow] said Mr. [Bush]'s standing heart rate was 46 beats a minute and his cholesterol 174. Both are little changed from a year ago and are normal for a fit man Mr. Bush's age. He turned 60 on July 6. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who contracted polio at age 39, was almost never photographed in a wheelchair. Just before he was elected to a fourth term, in 1944, his personal physician, Vice Adm. Ross T. McIntire, pronounced him ''perfectly O.K.'' despite what Admiral McIntire described as a recent bout of flu and bronchitis. Mr. Bush's weight has fluctuated. It was 194.5 pounds in June 2000, before he became president, 189 in 2001 and 2002. From Aug. 4, 2002, to Dec. 11, 2004, he gained 10.6 pounds. His doctors attributed some of that gain to increased muscle mass from exercise. Mr. Bush blamed doughnuts on the campaign trail

Tests at George Washington University Hospital found that Mr. Cheney's cardiac pacemaker was working properly and had not been activated due to arrhythmia, or irregular heartbeat, said Mr. Cheney's spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride. Mr. Cheney, 65, has had four heart attacks, the first when he was 37 and the fourth on Nov. 22, 2000, in the thick of the dispute between former Vice President Al Gore and President Bush over the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. Mr. Cheney has also had quadruple heart bypass surgery and two angioplasties, procedures to clear blockages in the arteries

In the study, which independent experts said was the most conclusive to examine the role of condoms in preventing infection with the virus, women whose male partners used condoms every time they had sexual intercourse had less than half the rate of infection than women whose partners used condoms less than 5 percent of the time. The study was conducted among students at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 2000, four government agencies convened a panel of condom experts to determine the medical accuracy of condom labels. The panel concluded that there was inadequate information about condom use in reducing the risk of all sexually transmitted infections except for the AIDS virus and, among men, gonorrhea, an editorial accompanying the journal article said

Outside of those countries which include Haiti, Cambodia, Kenya and Zimbabwe the number of new AIDS infections continues to rise or hover at its current pace. Meanwhile, public health efforts are reaching only a small proportion of people at risk, Dr. Peter Piot, the executive director of Unaids, said Tuesday. 'It's a very complex epidemic,' he said. 'We can no longer talk about AIDS' as a single epidemic but as many diverse ones. The progress against AIDS in some regions represents dividends from a surge in financing since 2001, when the United Nations pledged its commitment to stem the epidemic by 2010. That declaration called for countries to report regularly on their responses to AIDS. The report, the most comprehensive survey ever compiled from country data, pointed to the 2001 UN meeting as a turning point for AIDS financing. In 2005, the United States and the rest of the world spent $8.3 billion on AIDS, compared with $1.6 billion in 2001

Mr. [Kofi Annan] and Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of the AIDS program, spoke as the General Assembly began a three-day meeting aimed at renewing the political commitment urged in 2001 and setting new goals for expenditures and for measuring progress in the battle against AIDS. The General Assembly also heard from Khensani Mavasa of South Africa, who became the first person known to be infected with H.I.V. to address a plenary session about AIDS. Such sessions are normally reserved for United Nations officials and delegates from member countries. Khensani Mavasa of South Africa, addressing the United Nations yesterday, called for making condoms available to all to fight AIDS. (Photo by Stuart Ramson/Associated Press)

[Beatrice H. Hahn] reported, the findings show 'for the first time a clear picture of the origin of HIV-1 and the seeds of the AIDS pandemic.' Studies estimate that the human AIDS virus jumped species between 50 and 75 years ago. But no one knows who the first infected person was or how that person acquired HIV. Hahn said her team theorizes that HIV was first transmitted locally somewhere in west central Africa. Because the subspecies of chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes troglodytes, in which the simian virus had been found in captivity, lives in the wild in Cameroon, Gabon and Republic of Congo, the first infection could have been in any of those areas