HIV-poz soldiers OK’d for deployment by South Africa’s military

image photo: IRIN

    ::: As a result of changes announced in November but only now being implemented, HIV-positive recruits can now be accepted and deployed by South Africa’s military, the South African Security Forces Union (SASFU), PlusNews reports. HIV-positive service members who have no sign of AIDS-related illnesses and have undetectable HIV viral loads can now be classified as “G2K1”, meaning they have a chronic but treatable disease and can be deployed “anywhere at any time”. SASFU's surgeon general, Lt-Gen Vejaynand Ramlakan, told PlusNews that the policies, which are still partially classified, have been under consideration by the military for a “long time.” He said it had been necessary to consult with South Africa’s military commanders and with the UN peacekeeping forces with which SASFU soldiers are deployed, to convince them of the need to change the existing policy, and to prevent any misunderstanding. “The reason [the new policy] has taken so long is that we’re dealing with the stigma and fears that surround HIV and AIDS,” he said. “Military people share all the misunderstandings of wider society.”

hattip: Poz magazine

Posted by NewsEditor -- 01 Feb 2010 4:00 PM (PT)

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US HIV travel ban finally ends Monday

   ::: The US ban on entry into the country by HIV-positive visitors and immigrants finally comes to an end Monday as new immigration rules take effect, BBC reports. The ban was imposed at the height of a global panic about the disease at the end of the 1980s. In October, when he announced that the long bureaucratic process of eliminating the ban had started, President Obama said the original rules had been “rooted in fear rather than fact”. Rachel Tiven, head of the advocacy group Immigration Equality, told the BBC that the step was long overdue. “The 2012 World Aids Conference, due to be held in the United States, was in jeopardy as a result of the restrictions. It’s now likely to go ahead as planned,” she said. In September, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) issued a memo to its staff directing them not to deny green card applications if the sole reason for the denial would be the applicant’s HIV status.  These applications were, instead, put on hold, pending the publication of the final rule. In December, the State Department sent a memo to its embassies and consulates advising them that beginning January 4, 2010, HIV is no longer a reason to deny either short-term visitors visas or permanent residence visas.

Posted by NewsEditor -- 03 Jan 2010 9:43 PM (PT)

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Lighthouse in South Africa gets World AIDS Day protection

image Residents of the coastal town Umhlanga Rocks in South Africa awoke on Tuesday  morning—World AIDS Day—to find that the town’s famous landmark lighthouse had a new look.

Overnight, volunteers from The Unlimited Group, a financial services company, had wrapped the structure in a giant condom. Written on it is the simple message, “Know your status” along with the company’s logo (which, looks somewhat like an inverted AIDS red ribbon).

The message was installed on behalf of a children’s charity called “The Unlimited Child”, Times of South Africa reports.

“A condom on the lighthouse gets attention. In doing this, we hope to get attention of the rest of South Africa, and get everyone involved,” The Unlimited Child founder Iain Buchan said.

Buchan said the was sparked from personal tragedy when his housekeeper’s grandchildren, both AIDS orphans, continually failed at school, showing the impact of disease on their lives.

[see video raw footage below of volunteers putting on the “condom” and a helicopter shot of the result.]
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Posted by NewsEditor -- 01 Dec 2009 4:37 PM (PT)

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A city government in China opens gay bar to fight HIV/AIDS

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The government of a Chinese city has announced plans to open a gay bar as part of what city officials call an outreach effort to the area’s gay residents. The English edition of China’s People’s Daily reports that officials say the bar will become “common room for partner education”.

The bar will be opened on Dec. 1—World AIDS Day—by the city health department in Dali, which is described by Reuters as “a picturesque city on a lake in southwestern Yunnan province”.

Zhang Jianbo, the bar’s founder and manager, told the Global Times that the bar will serve as a platform to raise awareness of its gay clients about safe sex practice, according to People’s Daily.

“We might not even sell beverages in the bar. We will turn the bar into a tribune to offer lectures and training to gay people in order to reduce AIDS infections among them,” he said.

Dali has one of the China’s highest rates of HIV/AIDS . Chinese officials recently announced that sexual transmission has now become the primary route of HIV infection in the country. According to official statistics, 32 percent of new cases of HIV infection in the past year were reported among gay and bisexual men.

Jiang Anmin, vice director of the Dali Health Bureau, estimates that there are between 1,500 and 2,000 gay men in Dali, People’s Daily reports.

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Posted by NewsEditor -- 30 Nov 2009 11:10 AM (PT)

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US shouldn’t send PEPFAR funds to Uganda’s homophobic regime

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A report released last week by a progressive think tank detailed the many ways that US evangelical churches and right-wing political activists have helped to amplify—and even create—a deep well of homophobia in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

The activities of conservative US and European churches and of the missionaries they’ve dispatched to Africa, have have helped make LGBT people in Africa “collateral damage” of the US culture war, the report’s author states.

But US government funding is also involved in the cultural war that is now being waged in Africa against the continent’s sexual minorities.

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed column yesterday, James Kirchick—an assistant editor of the New Republic and a contributing writer to the Advocate—urges US officials to make sure foreign aid funds are not being used to support that African version of the US culture war.

Kirchick discusses the funding offered to African countries through the widely praised PEPFAR—President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—program.

The program, which was recently renewed by Congress, was created in 2003 by former President George W. Bush and has so far distributed nearly $50 billion worldwide, mostly in Africa. Funds are to be used to prevent the spread of HIV and to treat its victims.

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Posted by NewsEditor -- 24 Nov 2009 9:38 AM (PT)

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CDC panel finds little evidence to support abstinence-only sex-ed

image Palin baby-dad Levi Johnson via Flickrimage

A panel of public health professionals who studied reams of data on the effectiveness of sex-education in classrooms concludes that so-called comprehensive programs are effective.

The panel, appointed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), analyzed 62 studies and 83 study arms that evaluated comprehensive sexual-education programs, WebMD reports. Its members concluded that sex education programs that include both information about condoms and about delaying sexual initiation are effective because they:

  • Reduce the number of teens who have sex,
  • Reduce the frequency of sexual activity in teens who have sex,
  • Reduce the number of sex partners in teens who have sex,
  • Reduce sexually transmitted infections, including HIV transmission,
  • Increase use of condoms and other methods of birth control.

In what was, essentially, a split decision, the a majority of panel members recommended adoption of comprehensive programs, which are also called risk-reduction programs.

“The task force recommends group-based comprehensive risk reduction delivered to adolescents to promote behaviors that prevent or reduce the risk of pregnancy, HIV, and other sexually transmitted infections,” panel members wrote.

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Posted by NewsEditor -- 07 Nov 2009 11:29 AM (PT)

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Report – Health care reform benefits could be blocked by DOMA

Washington Blade’s Chris Johnson reports that the health care reform bill unveiled Monday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could could restrict benefits from flowing to LGBT people.

A Human Rights Campaign analyst warns, “I think there are some areas where there’s a potential there won’t be access to some of the benefits” for LGBT people.

Johnson writes:

[T]he bill, H.R. 3962, uses the terms “family” and “dependent,” and advocates say the new Health Choices Commissioner — a position established in the legislation to oversee the insurance exchange — could interpret this language to mean someone’s opposite-sex spouse, but not a same-sex spouse.

For example, the section describing the retiree reinsurance program — for which employer-based programs could submit claims to the government — says claims could be made on “employment based health benefits provided to a retiree or to the spouse, surviving spouse, or dependent of a retiree.”

Brian Moulton, the Human Rights Campaign’s chief legislative counsel, said the term “dependent” and “family” in the bill are “fairly open-ended” and “leave a lot of discretion to the new commissioner to define them.”

“Clearly, the only way to … ensure equality across the board is to repeal DOMA,” a legislative aide who requested anonymity told Johnson.

Others, including Rep. Tammy Baldwin and an HIV/AIDS advocate, insist that the bill would benefit many LGBT people even if DOMA remains in place.

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Posted by NewsEditor -- 05 Nov 2009 12:54 PM (PT)

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Obama signs Ryan White act extension; announces Jan. repeal of HIV travel ban

With Ryan White’s mother in attendance at a ceremony in the Diplomatic Reception Room, President Obama this morning signed the fourth re-extension of the HIV/AIDS funding program that bears the name of White, a 13-year-old boy from central Indiana who in 1984 contracted HIV/AIDS from a transfusion, and died in 1990.

[see video of the ceremony at end of this post]

In his remarks at the signing ceremony, the president also gave a firm date for the long-delayed repeal of the country’s regressive HIV travel ban:

On Monday my administration will publish a final rule that eliminates the travel ban effective just after the New Year. Congress and President Bush began this process last year, and they ought to be commended for it. We are finishing the job.

Obama thanked White’s mother, Jeanne White-Ginder for her continued efforts on behalf of HIV/AIDS care. “For 25 years, Jeanne had an immeasurable impact in helping ramp up America's response to this epidemic,” the president said. “While we lost Ryan at too young an age, Jeanne’s efforts have extended the lives and saved the lives of so many others. We are so appreciative to you.”

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Posted by NewsEditor -- 30 Oct 2009 1:10 PM (PT)

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Drug trial shows HIV vaccine could be ‘modestly protective’

Posted by NewsEditor  at 10:26 AM (PT)
In: health issues
Thursday September 24, 2009
Source: New York Times, Reuters, Xinhua, Bloomberg
image A trial of an experimental HIV vaccine has shown that it might be “modestly protective”, researchers said Thursday.

The vaccine lowered the risk of HIV infection by about 31 percent among 16,000 heterosexual Thai volunteers who had no special risk of AIDS infection, the US and Thai government researchers said.

The results from the largest-ever vaccine trial represents a revival in a campaign for a vaccine that appeared to stall two years ago when use of Merck’s experimental Ad5 vaccine boosted some people’s chances of infection in a study, Bloomberg reports.

“Although the results were modest, with an efficacy of 31.2 percent, this is a very important scientific advance, and gives us hope that a globally effective HIV vaccine may be possible in the future,” said Jerome Kim, a deputy director of science at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, which co-sponsored the trial. “It has already caused us to change some of our ideas,” Kim told reporters.

This is the first of several trials that has shown any effectiveness in preventing HIV infection, but scientists warned that the vaccine protected too few people to be declared an unqualified success.

“I don’t want to use a word like ‘breakthrough,’ but I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is a very important result,” Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said, according to New York Times. NIAID is one of the trial’s backers.

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Court – Insurance company ‘reprehensible’ in denying coverage to HIV-poz man

“Pre-existing condition” is a term often heard in the current debate over the various Congressional insurance reform bills, but just how the term is used to deny health insurance coverage became apparent once again in a case decided earlier this month by the South Carolina Supreme Court.

The Congressional bills would would do away with pre-existing condition exclusions.

In the case, an insurance company – Fortis Insurance – relied on a mistaken date written down by doctor’s office staffer to deny coverage to a young man living with HIV.

The South Carolina court unanimously awarded $10 million in punitive damages and $150,000 in actual damages to Jerome Mitchell, Jr. whose coverage was retroactively rescinded by his health insurer after he filed his first HIV-related claim, Gay City News reports. The court called the insurance company’s behavior “reprehensible” in the case.

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Posted by NewsEditor -- 21 Sep 2009 10:57 AM (PT)

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