HIV planning community town hall meeting for counties outside Philadelphia May 1st

We need your input in helping to create HIV prevention and care services outside Philadelphia

What is the most important HIV service in your region? What services are your community and organizations providing?

Join us on Wednesday, May 17th to learn more about HIV planning in Pennsylvania. The HIV Planning Group (HPG) is comprised of community members, health professionals, and stakeholders from across the Commonwealth, and they want to hear from you about your experiences and services provided in the collar counties around Philadelphia.

FREE dinner is provided if you RSVP! Local public transportation reimbursement available!

Specific discussions and events will occur throughout the afternoon with the community about what HPG does and how they plan to improve the HIV Care Continuum and lives in PA and the region. The finalized agenda will be added to the event page upon approval.

You can participate in the meeting by joining us at the The Alloy King of Prussia – Double Tree by Hilton or join us remotely on your computer or phone on Microsoft Teams at https://bit.ly/HPGMayTownHall.

Of course, we’d really love to see you in person! Please RSVP on this page by Monday, May 1st. There’s no need to RSVP if you attend virtually.

Your RSVP is solely for event and food planning purposes. Your information will be securely stored by the HIV Prevention and Care Project at the University of Pittsburgh and will not be publicized or shared with any outside organization.

We are looking forward to hearing from you on how to continue improving local and statewide planning for the HIV-related issues that are important to you!

Keep in mind: this town hall is specifically for the collar counties of Philadelphia. All members of the community are encouraged to attend, but specific events and discussions at the town hall will have to do with the counties surrounding Philadelphia.

Ending the HIV Epidemic: Culturally Attuned Educational Materials for American Indians/Alaska Natives

From HIV.gov….

As one of several Indian Health Service activities supported by the Minority HIV/AIDS Fund (MHAF) in Fiscal Year 2020, the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI) is currently leading a project focused on creating culturally attuned HIV education materials—including print, digital, and video formats—for both American Indian and Alaska Native patients and the healthcare providers who serve them.

UIHI , located in Seattle, Washington, works to provide information to and assist urban Indian-serving organizations to better the urban Indian community’s health nationwide. Seven out of 10 American Indians and Alaska Natives currently live in urban settings away from federally defined tribal lands. Since 2016, UIHI has led several projects that promote culturally attuned HIV prevention and treatment.

Among the new materials being developed under this project, in March 2020, UIHI released a short film, Positively Native , in which long-time HIV survivors Bill Hall (Tlingit), Shana Cozad (Kiowa), and Hamen Ides (Lummi) discuss their lived experiences with HIV stigma, discrimination, and advocacy. Along with the film, UIHI released an accompanying toolkit that includes a facilitator’s guide, discussion questions, and a presentation on the basics of HIV. The organization presented Positively Native to an audience of 38 people at the International Indigenous Pre-Conference on HIV/AIDS in July 2020.

Read the full article on HIV.gov.

J&J developing immunization against HIV

From Bloomberg.com…

is preparing to test an experimental HIV vaccine in the U.S. and Europe in a move toward developing the first immunization against the deadly disease after decades of frustration.

Some 3,800 men who have sex with men will receive a regimen of shots in a study that’s planned to be launched later this year, Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview. The agency and the HIV Vaccine Trials Network of testing sites will collaborate with J&J’s Janssen unit on the effort.

Since cases first began to gain notice in the early 1980s, scientists have been searching fruitlessly for a vaccine against the virus that causes AIDS and kills close to 1 million people worldwide annually. Efforts are continuing with at least two other promising candidates in late-stage studies.

Read the full article.

Most Americans not tested for HIV

From CNN…

Most Americans have never been tested for HIV, the virus that attacks and weakens a person’s immune system.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is hoping to change that.

According to a new report, the agency found that fewer than 40% of people in the United States have been screened for HIV. It recommends that all people 13 to 64 be tested at least once.

Fifty jurisdictions across the country are responsible for more than half of all HIV diagnoses, yet only 35% of the people recommended for testing in those areas were screened in the previous year, the CDC says. And fewer than 30% of people across the country with the highest risk of acquiring HIV were tested in that period.

“Diagnosis and treatment are the first steps toward affording individuals living with HIV a normal life expectancy,” CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said in a statement. “As we encourage those at risk for HIV to seek care, we need to meet them in their journey. This means clearing the path of stigma, finding more comfortable ways of delivering health services, as well as learning from individuals already in treatment so the journey becomes easier for others who follow.”

Read the full article.

To find HIV testing near you, go the CDC testing locator. Most locations are free.

Information Archieve

HPCP provides an informative archive of news, research and information regarding HIV and other STDs. The archive stretches back ten years and is on-going.

Scroll down to read the most recent posts or search to the right on specific topics. You can also choose a month and date if you’re looking for a range of articles within a specific time period.

Documentary 5B shows the real heroes of the AIDS epidemic

From People.com…

This was a time when people weren’t even touching patients with HIV,” says Priyanka Chopra, a prominent supporter of the film on behalf of the AIDS charity RED, which will receive 30 percent of all box office proceeds. “They would lay in their soiled bedsheets for days where nobody would come and even enter their room to feed them. At that time, these nurses chose to not think about whether they would live or die and actually the nobility of the profession is what you see in this movie.”

The film, which received a four-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival last month, features the nurses of ward 5B at San Francisco General Hospital who didn’t allow societal ignorance, prejudice and fear curtail their drive to administer compassionate health care to patients who had otherwise been cast aside. These were patients who most health care professionals wouldn’t touch without wearing gloves, even a hazmat suit.

Read the full article.

Sex education isn’t serving young Black women

From the Philadelphia Enquirer…

This story is part of Made In Philly, a series about young residents shaping local communities.

When Shanaye Jeffers was in fourth grade, she often skipped touch football and double-dutch jump rope at recess to read a book on puberty. In fifth grade, she jumped at the chance to do a school project on childbirth.

Most girls don’t know about the inner workings of their bodies, sexual-health experts say — especially black teenage girls, who often face stigma against asking questions at home and are poorly served by sex-education school curriculums tailored for a white majority.

“Sex ed is not serving young black women really at all,” said Jeffers, now a 28-year-old obstetrics and gynecology resident at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. She’s trying to change that. As Philadelphia site director for Daughters of the Diaspora, a nonprofit founded in 2012 to teach black teenage girls about reproductive health and self-esteem, Jeffers is working to give other girls the same knowledge and passion to take charge of their health that she had as a child.

Read the full article.

Once a month treatment for HIV on the horizon

From MedicalExpress.com…

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 38,000 people in the U.S. were newly infected with HIV in 2017. For more than 15 years, the first line of therapy has been a suite of antiretroviral drugs in pill form, taken once a day. Although this treatment has transformed HIV from a certain killer to a chronic disease in much of the developed world, there are problems. For example, some people have trouble taking their pill every day. Therefore, pharmaceutical companies are developing injectable HIV drugs that target different components of the virus and can be administered once every few weeks, writes Senior Editor Megha Satyanarayana.

Currently, at least nine long-acting injectable therapies for HIV are in clinical development. Recently, ViiV Healthcare released data from two Phase III clinical trials of a combination treatment of two drugs that inhibit different parts of the virus. When given as an intramuscular injection, the therapy was as effective as pills and persisted in the body for at least a month.

Read the full article.

Truvada going generic

From out.com…

Get PrEP-ared for generic Truvada in the next year, according to an official document that Gilead, the pharmaceutical company that manufactures the drug, released on their website.

According to a quarterly report filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gilead announced that it reached an agreement to allow a generic version of Truvada to be manufactured in the United States on September 30, 2020.

In a statement, Aaron S. Lord, a physician and member of PrEP4All, called the decision a “victory for the LGBTQ+ community, for HIV activists, and for U.S. taxpayers,” and cautioned that the fight for widespread PrEP access is not over. Lord specifically pointed to the fact that only Teva will be allowed to manufacture generic PrEP.

“This will do little to reduce price in a way that will increase access and PrEP4All remains suspicious of the terms and lack of transparency surrounding the Teva settlement,” Lord wrote in the statement. “I have to ask, what’s to stop them — other than a desire for profit margins — from releasing the rights now?”

Read the full article.

First living HIV-positive organ donor wants to lift ‘the shroud of HIV related stigma’

From NPR online…

Nina Martinez just became the world’s first living HIV-positive organ donor.

In a medical breakthrough, surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital late last month successfully transplanted one of her kidneys to a recipient who is also HIV positive.

“I feel wonderful,” Martinez, 35, said in an interview with NPR’s Michel Martin, 11 days into her recovery. The patient who received her kidney has chosen to remain anonymous, but is doing well, Martinez is told.

Nina Martinez and her surgeon, Dr. Dorry Segev

“They’re doing wonderfully and they got an organ they desperately needed to get and that’s all I could ask for,” Martinez said.

HIV advocates are celebrating the achievement as an important step towards lifting the stigma around a disease that affects some 1.1 million Americans. In 2017, an estimated 18 patients died each day while waiting for an organ transplant. Many of these deaths involved HIV positive patients who have traditionally had access to a much smaller pool of potential organ donors.

Read the full article on NPR.com.