Recent gains in the global fight against HIV/AIDS could be reversed as the “global economic downturn pinches poor countries’ budgets and donors show signs of backing away from their promise to provide universal access to AIDS treatment,” the British government together with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) warned Tuesday, Reuters AlertNet reports…

Argos Therapeutics announced the publication of a manuscript in the February edition of Clinical Immunology, detailing positive immune response, safety and manufacturing data for its AGS-004 immunotherapy for HIV. AGS-004 is a product of the Company’s Arcelis™ technology, and is a personalized, RNA-loaded dendritic cell-based immunotherapy that is perfectly matched to each patient’s unique HIV viral burden. The manuscript details a clinical study in which AGS-004 was evaluated in type-1 HIV-infected adults who were being treated with antiretroviral therapy (ART)…

UNITAID welcomes the announcement today of the MASSIVEGOOD initiative, established to provide additional funding for UNITAID’s work in expanding access to treatment for HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. Launched by the Millennium Foundation, a Swiss based foundation supported by UNITAID, MASSIVEGOOD brings together leading companies in the travel industry to kick off an individual and corporate movement in the United States to raise funds for global health. “We look forward to this initiative becoming significant,” said Jorge Bermudez, Executive Secretary of UNITAID…

Pfizer’s Prevnar 7 vaccine, which protects against pneumonia and meningitis, has been shown to reduce the risk of recurrent pneumococcal infection in patients living with HIV in Malawi, according to a study published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, Reuters reports. “In HIV-infected patients, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, the risk of developing [invasive pneumococcal disease] IPD … is between 30 and 100 times higher, the scientists said in their study,” Reuters writes…

Philippines’ Health Secretary Seeks To Boost Condom Distribution After Increase In HIV Diagnoses The Philippines’ Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral on Thursday announced she would seek additional public funds to support the distribution of condoms among high-risk groups, after the country recorded 143 new cases of HIV in January - its highest number of diagnoses in an individual month on record, Reuters reports. “Since the start of 2009, Cabral said, an average of about 60 Filipinos had been diagnosed as HIV-positive each month…

A five-day workshop that opened Monday in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, will address ways to improve HIV/AIDS surveillance in the Asia region, Viet Nam News reports. The workshop has brought together “surveillance technical staff from government departments, non-governmental organisations and U.S. Government agencies from 14 countries in Asia to provide updates and best practices on key issues related to the conduct and use of HIV/AIDS surveillance data,” according to the news service (3/3)…

U.S. Ambassador To U.N. In Geneva Assumes Position, Ending 13 Month Vacancy Betty King reported to her new position as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva on Wednesday, the Associated Press reports. “Washington’s Geneva mission had been without an ambassador since Warren W. Tichenor left his post on Jan.

Two teams of researchers - including Los Alamos National Laboratory theoretical biologists Bette Korber, Will Fischer, Sydeaka Watson, and James Szinger - have announced an HIV vaccination strategy that has been shown to expand the breadth and depth of immune responses in rhesus monkeys. Rhesus monkeys provide the best animal model currently available for testing HIV vaccines. The research appeared in two back-to-back articles in Nature Medicine this week, and outlines a strategy, called “mosaic vaccines,” for reducing the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS…

Unequal progress in achieving U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for tuberculosis and child mortality in low-income countries is related to the countries’ burdens of HIV and non-communicable diseases (NCD), according to a study published Tuesday in the journal PLoS Medicine, Reuters reports (Kelland, 3/2). For the study, researchers calculated the distance 227 countries had to reach their MDG goals for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and infant and child mortality targets for the year 2005…

UCLA AIDS Institute researchers successfully removed CCR5 - a cell receptor to which HIV-1 binds for infection but which the human body does not need - from human cells. Individuals who naturally lack the CCR5 receptor have been found to be essentially resistant to HIV. Using a humanized mouse model, the researchers transplanted a small RNA molecule known as short hairpin RNA (shRNA), which induced RNA interference into human blood stem cells to inhibit the expression of CCR5 in human immune cells…