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Mexico City: Can a pill a day help prevent infection from HIV, the virus that causes AIDS?
No one knows. But researchers in a number of countries are conducting trials and planning others to test the unproven strategy that a daily pill, or a combination of drugs, can prevent HIV.
By mid-2009, more people will be enrolled in such trials than in all of those for HIV vaccines and microbicides, the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition said in a report issued here on Sunday at the start of the 17th International AIDS Conference.
Initial findings of the safety and effectiveness might come early next year, although researchers do not know how they will compare to the disappointing results of recent tests of HIV vaccines and microbicides, chemicals that women can put in their vagina to prevent HIV infection.
In the face of those bleak findings, some AIDS experts say testing the prophylactic use of antiretroviral drugs, called PrEP, for pre-exposure prophylaxis, is now the most promising research in HIV prevention efforts as scientific investigation of vaccines and microbicides continues.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which released a report on Saturday showing that the number of people newly infected with HIV in the US in recent years was 40% higher than has long been reported, said that PrEP was among the strategies that needed to be developed to substantially reduce the incidence of HIV. An estimated 2.7 million people become infected each year worldwide.
“We cannot wait for the study results to begin to prepare for the optimal use and delivery of PrEP,” said Pedro Goicochea, an investigator in a PrEP study in Peru and Ecuador. “Instead, we should look ahead to consider all of the possible outcomes of these trials and make real plans for making PrEP available to those who can benefit from it, as quickly and safely as possible if it is proven effective.”
The US Agency for International Development, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health are paying in part for all of the trials. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is paying for part of two. The organizations have undertaken the trials because of the success in giving antiretroviral drugs to pregnant women to prevent HIV infection in their infants and drugs to prevent malaria.
In 2007, Family Health International completed a similar study of the antiretroviral drug tenofovir for HIV prevention among young women in Ghana, providing the first data showing such use was both safe and acceptable among uninfected users. But the study did not indicate if PrEP was effective in preventing new infections.
Initial PrEP studies are testing tenofovir. Infected people taking these licensed drugs have shown limited side effects like nausea, diarrhea and intestinal gas. But their safety must be established among noninfected people as well as among participants who become infected in the study. Up to 15,000 people are expected to be participating in trials by mid-2009. NYT NEWS SERVICE
Drug addicts benefit from HIV drugs too
Drug abusers benefit just as much from HIV drugs as people who are infected sexually or some other way, Canadian researchers reported on Sunday. Their finding, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and presented at an international AIDS meeting in Mexico City, contradicts widespread worry that drug abusers cannot stick to treatment. “A large number of prior reports have demonstrated that because of issues of social instability related to illicit drug addiction, HIV-infected injecting drug users may not be deriving the full benefits of HAART (HIV drugs),” Dr. Julio Montaner of the University of British Columbia and St Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues wrote. REUTERS

Source: Times of India

The Server Room, Ars Technica’s community for IT professionals, is sponsored by Dell’s Future of Storage. This article is part of our ongoing series of topics and discussions related to IT and storage technology.

When you drop an optical disk into your computer, gaming console, or player of choice, the machine reads information off the surface of the disc. The density of data is limited by the wavelength of the light used to read and write the data. Currently, available technology allows us to store around 25 GB of data on a single layer, so up to 50 GB of data can go on one side of a dual layer disc; some future formats are promising even more. A new research paper in this week’s edition of Applied Optics describes a method of storing data throughout the volume of a disc, and its authors have built a demonstration system that uses a standard-size (120mm x 1.2mm) optical disc to store 1 TB of data. Read More

Though NASA has been reporting for years that there is water ice on Mars, today the US space agency held a press conference to announce definitively that the Phoenix Lander has found traces of water ice on the red planet. As Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy points out, today’s announcement was really about the continuation of the Phoenix mission, which was scheduled to sunset in the next few weeks. Now that the cool lander is scooping up hunks of ice in the sticky Martian dirt (plastered into the bottom of Phoenix’s scoop, above), NASA has poured enough money into the project to keep it going at least through September. But pretty much every single news source reporting the Martian water story has neglected to tell you the most important thing about this “water ice.” It’s probably not drinkable. Read More

UPDATED 11:00 a.m.| Facebook says the decision to block Scrabulous for U.S. and Canadian users was made by the Scrabulous developers, not Facebook.

If you try to pull up the popular Scrabble-like game, you get the following message: “Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here.” If you click, you get a form from the Scrabulous founders asking for your e-mail address so they can keep you posted on further developments.

Read More: NY Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon wants its customers to take their wallets with them when they leave the giant Web store.

The Seattle-based online retailer unveiled on Tuesday a new payment service that it will offer other online retailers to use on their Web sites. That means the 81 million customers who have already given Amazon.com their payment details, like credit card numbers and shipping addresses, will be able to use that information, without re-entering it, to buy products on any site that uses the new service.

Read More: NY Times