Faculty Bibliography

One of the mysteries of the AIDS epidemic is that a small number of female prostitutes in Africa seem resistant to the virus that causes the disease even though they often have sex with infected men. Now an even more baffling finding has turned up in a study of 1,900 prostitutes in Nairobi, Kenya. Four of them became infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, but only after they stopped working as prostitutes or took breaks of two months or more, leaders of the study reported at the Seventh Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, which ended here today. The prostitutes work in a Nairobi slum. In 1984, researchers from the University of Nairobi and the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, began to study and treat the women's sexually transmitted diseases

SAN FRANCISCO - Using a new statistical method and one of the world's most powerful computers, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory said Tuesday that they have traced the origin of the AIDS epidemic to around 1930, nearly 30 years before the earliest known infection in humans. The virus could have originated from 1910 to 1950, but 1930 seems the most probable date based on calculations of the AIDS virus' family tree and the rate at which it mutated over time, Dr. Bette Korber, the head of the research team, told the Seventh Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in San Francisco

Using a new statistical method and one of the world's most powerful computers, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory said today that they had traced the origin of the AIDS epidemic to around 1930, nearly 30 years before the earliest known infection in humans. The virus could have originated from 1910 to 1950, but 1930 seems the most probable date based on calculations of the AIDS virus's family tree and the rate at which the virus mutated over time, Dr. Bette Korber, the head of the research team, told the Seventh Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. The 1930 date ''does not necessarily mark the point where a chimp bit a man,'' Dr. Korber said, because the chimpanzee virus could have been introduced into humans many times earlier without further transmission

Using a new statistical method and one of the world's most powerful computers, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory said yesterday that they had traced the origin of the AIDS epidemic to around 1930, nearly 30 years before the earliest known infection in humans. The virus could have originated from 1910 to 1950, but 1930 seems the most probable date based on calculations of the AIDS virus' family tree and the rate at which the virus mutated over time, Dr. Bette Korber, the head of the research team, told the Seventh Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections here

Using a new statistical method and one of the world's most powerful computers, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory said yesterday that they had traced the origin of the AIDS epidemic to around 1930, nearly 30 years before the earliest known infection in humans. The virus could have originated from 1910 to 1950, but 1930 seems the most probable date based on calculations of the AIDS virus' family tree and the rate at which the virus mutated over time, Dr. Bette Korber, the head of the research team, told the seventh Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections here. The new findings also challenge a theory advanced by Edward Hooper, a British journalist, in his book 'The River,' that the AIDS epidemic was inadvertently brought on when the chimpanzee virus got into an experimental polio vaccine tested in the Belgian Congo in the late 1950s and prepared at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia or laboratories in Belgium and the Belgian Congo

SAN FRANCISCO -- Using a new statistical method and one of the world's most powerful computers, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory said Tuesday that they had traced the origin of the AIDS epidemic to around 1930, nearly 30 years before the earliest known infection in humans. The human immunodeficiency virus associated with AIDS could have originated from 1910 to 1950, but 1930 seems the most probable date based on calculations of the HIV family tree and the rate at which the virus mutated over time, Dr. Bette Korber, the head of the research team, told the Seventh Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. The approach also has been used to determine when different species diverged from a common ancestor. Similar studies of human mitochondrial DNA have also identified a common female ancestor of modern humans, called 'Eve,' who migrated out of Africa sometime between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. According to the Los Angeles Times, some researchers called Korber's species-leaping HIV a viral Eve

SAN FRANCISCO - Estrogen strongly protected against infection by the simian AIDS virus in experiments with female monkeys, offering hope that it might be used to protect against the human AIDS virus in women, researchers reported here at a meeting on the disease. In the study, estrogen injected into a small group of female monkeys produced a thicker layer of cells in their vaginas. That acted as a protective barrier against infection when SIV, the simian AIDS virus, was squirted into the vagina to test the effectiveness of the therapy. 'The results were striking,' said research team head Dr. Preston Marx of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City

Estrogen strongly protected against infection by the simian AIDS virus in experiments with female monkeys, offering hope that it might be used to protect against the human AIDS virus in women, researchers have reported here at a meeting on the disease. In the study, estrogen injected into a small group of female monkeys produced a thicker layer of cells in their vaginas. That acted as a protective barrier against infection when S.I.V., the simian AIDS virus, was squirted into the vagina to test the effectiveness of the therapy. ''The results were striking,'' said the head of the research team, Dr. Preston Marx of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City. Dr. Marx and public health officials cautioned that much more research was needed to prove that a topical estrogen cream applied to the vagina could protect women against H.I.V. ''We can't assume estrogen would have the same effect in women'' or that topical application would be as effective as injected estrogen, Dr. Marx said in an interview today

Communication with dying patients and their families requires special skills to assist them in this extremely stressful period. This article begins with a case that illustrates many of the challenges of communicating with the dying. It then reviews the literature about communication with older patients at the end of life, focusing on physician-patient discussions, decision-making, advance directives, and cultural factors. The article concludes with a practical discussion of problems that physicians may encounter when working with older patients at the end of life and their families and recommendations to improve communication