“There have been reports about Ebola survivors selling their blood on the black market in the affected countries,” one audience member from Lagos, Nigeria said at a roundtable discussion on Ebola during the recent American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene meeting in New Orleans in early November. “Is there any effort to regulate this? …
Is there a Black Market for Ebola Convalescent Blood Products? Read More »
“Coordination has been a routine failure in Ebola outbreak after Ebola outbreak,” Dr Armand Sprecher of MSF said during a roundtable discussion at the ASTMH conference in response to a question from a healthcare worker from Taiwan. She said her country would be sending a number of healthcare workers to the field soon and wanted …
Coordination of new teams of Ebola responders a big challenge Read More »
Dr. Tim Jagatic of Médecins Sans Frontières spent March and April in Guinea when the Ebola outbreak was first recognized — and returned to West Africa to fight the disease in July. “When I went to West Africa the second time, people might have thought: 1) I’m masochistic and don’t have any sense of self-preservation, …
MSF doctor feels safe working in field fighting Ebola Read More »
Ebola experts at the ASTMH conference in New Orleans concerned about the effect of Ebola on the health systems in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone — as the Ebola response has drawn physicians and nurses away from the normal care system. “A lot of the health infrastructure has collapsed in these countries. For instance, maternal …
Ebola’s impact on West African countries health infrastructure Read More »
“The number of things that need to go right for an outbreak to be controlled is significant — a lot of working pieces are interdependent,” said Dr Armand Sprecher of Médecins Sans Frontières at the 63rd Annual American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene Conference this November in New Orleans. The health promoters and the …
Operational aspects of the response: MSF in West Africa Read More »
A new study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases confirms that HIV dual infection and HIV reinfection are common. Researchers at University of California in San Diego and colleagues used new sequencing technology and phylogenetic analyses to determine the incidence and prevalence of dual infection by more than one strain of HIV in …
Incidence of HIV dual infections in US men who have sex with men Read More »
Two recent papers present conflicting data on the efficacy of histone deacteylase (HDAC) inhibitors, the leading class of latency reversing agents (LRAs). Replication-competent integrated HIV provirus is able to form a persist reservoir in cellular compartments such as resting memory CD4 T cells by remaining in a long-term latent state that is highly stable. Activation …
A report in Nature Medicine is important for suggesting that a recently discovered and little understood subset of CD4 T cells are a long-term hiding place for the HIV reservoir. Maria Buzon and colleagues at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Boston, describe their analysis of the HIV reservoir in different …
HIV reservoir: CD4 T stem cells may facilitate long-term persistence Read More »
An alarming increase in the incidence of both HIV-infection and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) has been occurring amongst men who have sex with men (MSM) in England over the last two years. A number of news reports highlight an alarming increase in the incidence of gonorrhoea, chlamydia and syphilis among MSM, particularly in …
London’s HIV crisis: A storm seeded in the noughties? Read More »
Tuberculosis (TB) is largely under control in the industrialised countries of the ‘Global North’, which means that most of the effort to eliminate TB will fall on the shoulders of those emerging middle-income countries where TB is still an epidemic. HOW CAN BRICS PROMOTE RESEARCH TO END TB? In January this year (2013), the health …
The critical role of the emerging middle-income countries in eliminating TB Read More »