HIV/AIDS

The first legally approved HIV self-testing kit has gone on sale in the UK. The BioSure HIV Self Test will enable people to test themselves when and where they like, with a 99.7% accuracy rate. An estimated 26,000 people in the UK have HIV but are unaware of it, making them unknowingly responsible for the majority of onward transmissions. Due to developments in treatments available, HIV is now a manageable disease but late diagnosis can have a devastating impact on health and life expectancy.

Treating HIV with an antibody can reduce the levels of the virus in people's bodies — at least temporarily. The approach, called passive immunization, involves infusing antibodies into a person's blood. Several trials are under way in humans, and researchers hope that the approach could help to prevent, treat or even cure HIV. The work is a milestone towards those goals, says Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. “This is an early study, but it’s a study with some impressive results,” he says.

Record-breaking numbers of people in eastern Africa have received HIV counselling and testing through two historic initiatives in Ethiopia, Botswana, South Africa and Tanzania. In the Gambella Region of Ethiopa, a new world record was set for the most people being tested for HIV during an eight-hour period. The initiative brought together 3,383 people to receive HIV counselling and testing at the Gambella Stadium. Three representatives of the Guinness Book of World Records were present to record the event.

Two studies of PrEP in gay men and trans women have demonstrated that the availability of PrEP reduced the rate of infection by 86%. This amounts to the highest effectiveness yet seen for PrEP and is superior to most other HIV prevention interventions. Extraordinarily, two separate studies which provided PrEP in very different ways found exactly the same level of effectiveness. The PROUD study was conducted in England and the IPERGAY study in France and Canada.

In a gathering at Kampala’s Grand Global Hotel on January 29, five key population groups chose five nominees each for seats on the Country Coordinating Mechanism panel. In a new election scheduled for February 5, those nominees will meet and choose a total of two of their number to serve on the CCM. The CCM oversees programs and makes key decisions about requests for funding from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which finances many of Uganda’s anti-AIDS efforts.

Kehinde Bademosi, founder of Nigerian marketing school Orange Academy, has come out as gay in a public posting on Facebook. In a similar move Bademosi publically disclosed his HIV-positive status last December on World AIDS Day. Bademosi’s latest announcement coincides with the one-year anniversary of Nigeria’s Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act being signed into law by president Goodluck Jonathan.

An annual "Intimate Partner Violence" report by The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs says that black gay couples are almost twice as likely to be stalked and/or abused by their partner. What's up with that? Here are come charts from their website with key findings.

62% of LGBTQ IPV survivors are people of colour

LGBTQ Black/African American people are more likely to experience physical violence from intimate partners

Up to a fifth of HIV infections among black African men initially classified as 'heterosexual exposure' in the UK are likely to have been acquired as a result of sex with other men, investigators report in the online edition of "AIDS". Using a technique called phylogenetic analysis, the authors identified clusters of HIV transmissions involving people diagnosed with HIV in the UK between 1996 and 2008. Overall, 29% of heterosexual people were in transmission clusters that only involved men who have sex with men (MSM).

We analysed 7 studies from Canada, 13 from the UK, and 174 from the USA. In every country, black MSM were as likely to engage similarly in serodiscordant unprotected sex as other MSM. Black MSM in Canada and the USA were less likely than other MSM to have a history of substance use (odds ratio, OR, 0·53, 95% CI 0·38–0·75, for Canada and 0·67, 0·50–0·92, for the USA).

Pooled estimates from across the African diaspora show that black men who have sex with men (MSM) are 15 times more likely to be HIV positive compared with general populations and 8·5 times more likely compared with black populations. Disparities in the prevalence of HIV infection are greater in African and Caribbean countries that criminalise homosexual activity than in those that do not criminalise such behaviour.