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HIV/AIDS
November 30, 2010
Public clinics in Travis County launch routine HIV testing
Four public health clinics in Travis County are routinely testing adults for HIV/AIDS, and 12 of the other 15 CommUnityCare clinics will be doing it after the first of the year, health officials said Tuesday.
The announcement, timed to coincide with World AIDS Day Wednesday, is an effort to reduce HIV infections and is part of a trend in which health care providers are routinely testing patients. A new Texas law that took effect this year requires testing of pregnant women in the third trimester — women already are tested at the first prenatal visit but their status can change during pregnancy — to prevent HIV spread to newborns.
In addition, public health clinics in Dallas and Harris counties do routine testing, along with many private physicians’ offices, officials said.
“It was the right thing to do for the community at the right time,” said Lynda Blakeslee, grants program manager at the David Powell Clinic, which exclusively treats patients with HIV/AIDS. David Powell won’t need to follow the testing protocol because its patients already know their status.
Blakeslee said the testing is for patients ages 18 to 64, and those who are opposed can opt out of it.
Participants will have their blood tested, just as their sugar, cholesterol and other routine tests are done. Blakeslee said funds aren’t available to test people older than 65 and she hopes they will be covered later by Medicare.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday that it recommends HIV testing in health care settings.
As many as one in five people don’t know they are infected, and more than half of adults, 55 percent, between the ages of 18 and 64 have never been tested for HIV, the CDC said. “Even among people at higher risk for HIV infection, 28 percent have never been tested,” it said.
Blakeslee said the pilot testing was started in four clinics in the northeast part of Travis County: A.K. Black Health Center, 928 Blackson Ave.; Manor Health Center, 600 W. Carrie-Manor; Pflugerville Health Center, 15822 Foothill Farms Loop; and Rundberg Health Center, 825 E. Rundberg Lane.
The testing started there because “we had the possibility of a high rate of incidence there, and we knew there were some high risk behaviors … with drugs and sex,” Blakeslee said.
Since the testing started in March, 1,300 people have been tested. One person was found to be positive for HIV and another result is indeterminate but likely to become positive, Blakeslee said. That may seem low but officials expect that when the program is fully operational to find 1 percent of clients to be positive, Blakeslee said.
The forthcoming 2009 Texas HIV Surveillance Report shows that Travis County has the third-highest rate of persons living with HIV per 100,000 population among Texas counties, according to Carrie Williams, spokeswoman for the Department of State Health Services.The county’s rate of 394.5 people per 100,000 is behind only Dallas County, which has a rate of 581.9 per 100,000 and Harris County, which has a rate of 493.2, Williams said.
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September 10, 2010
UT Southwestern researchers testing new HIV vaccine
Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas announced today that they testing a combination of two potential vaccines to see if they will prevent HIV/AIDS.
The researchers are recruiting individuals at high risk of contracting HIV for the nationwide clinical trial and are accepting people from the Austin area, a spokeswoman at the school said today.
The trial is being funded by the HIV Vaccine Trials Network and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The Dallas school is one of several sites testing the vaccines.
“We hope that this trial will help us better understand how the immune system may work to prevent HIV/AIDS,” Dr. Mamta Jain, an assistant professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern and the lead researcher at Dallas, said in a news release. “It is with this better understanding of the immune system that we may ultimately find a vaccine that may prevent HIV infection.”
Study participants can’t get HIV from the vaccine, Jain said, adding that the trial will help researchers better understand why some people develop AIDS and others do not.
Other efforts to create an HIV vaccine have not succeeded to date. Jain said the trial involving Southwestern and several other locations around the country “is the only HIV vaccine trial in the country enrolling participants” at this time.
The school is not able to reimburse people for travel expenses, a spokeswoman said. It would require that people taking part in the three-year study receive three shots of the vaccine or a placebo, plus a booster, in the first six months and return every three months for visit.
Researchers are recruiting, non-HIV-infected men, ages 18 to 45, who have sex with men and transgender women who have sex with men.
For more information about the trial, call 214-590-0610 or 214-590-0603, or visit the Hope Takes Action website.
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June 24, 2010
One in five with HIV don't know it; free testing Monday
How can you protect a partner from HIV/AIDS if you don’t know your status? Or, how can you protect yourself if you don’t know your partner’s HIV status? You can’t.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than one in five of the 1.2 million Americans living with HIV don’t know they’re infected. The Austin/Travis County Health and Human Services Department says that almost 40 percent of HIV-infected people are not diagnosed until they already have developed AIDS.
We don’t know what percentage of those people could have prevented a lot of heartache, not to mention acquiring full-blown AIDS, had they gotten tested. But knowledge is power.
To that end, the department is offering free, confidential HIV testing Monday to mark National HIV Testing Day, held annually since 1995 because of the growing number of HIV infections in minority communities and other groups who are unaware of their HIV status.
The testing is for walk-ins only and will be offered locally from 1 to 7 p.m. at the health department’s RBJ Health Center, 15 Waller St.
In Travis County, 1,587 HIV cases have been reported since 1999, the health department said.
The group at greatest risk in Travis County is gay men, with 64 percent of the reported cases of HIV in that category, the health department said. About 86 percent of the people with HIV in Travis County are male; 52 percent are white.
African Americans also are at high risk. Although they make up about 9 percent of the county’s population (2008 census estimates), they are 22 percent of reported HIV cases, the health department said. Hispanics, on the other hand, are 33 percent of Travis County’s population and 25 percent of the HIV cases, the health department said.
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July 22, 2008
HIV's Achilles' heel discovered?
Researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston say they have found HIV’s Achilles’ heel, a small portion of a protein hidden inside the virus that tricks the body’s defenses.
“HIV’s cleverness is unmatched. No other virus uses this trick to evade the body’s defenses,” Sudhir Paul, one of the researchers and a pathology professor at the UT Medical School at Houston, said in a news release about the discovery.
What he and fellow researchers have found is “a tiny stretch of amino acids” in the virus that remain constant so it can attach to cells and the virus can do its damage without triggering the body’s attack system. These amino acids make up an essential protein in the virus that causes infection and can produce AIDS. Now that these scientists know where the sweet spot is, Paul and his group can work on targeting treatments to attack it. “The most interesting part of it is the way we are proposing to treat the virus — by getting rid of thousands of units of the virus by using a single unit of our drug,” Paul said.
The big question, of course, will their work lead to a vaccine, the holy grail in HIV research? Will they succeed where many others have failed?
A spokesman at UT said Paul and his team have been invited to the XVII International AIDS Conference in Mexico City next month to discuss their work and share their data. Paul said a student will go and represent the group.
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