Latest by John S. James
HIV Treatment and Immunology Research: Current Ideas
A recent report on two specialized scientific conferences looks at some of the most important current ideas on developing new kinds of HIV treatments. The conferences took place in April 2004, and the report,1 by immunologist Gareth Hardy, Ph.D., was...
Regrettably, Cambodia Stops Important Tenofovir Prevention Trial
On August 11, 2004, the Cambodian government ordered researchers not to proceed with a trial to test whether once-daily use of tenofovir (brand name Viread), a drug already widely used to treat HIV, could prevent new infections in healthy people. The...
Abstinence, Abstinence-Only, Faith-Based, and the Psychology of Stigma
The June 23 talk by President Bush in Philadelphia (see "President Bush on AIDS: More Questions Than Answers" in this issue) raised deeper issues that need attention.
There is common ground on abstinence; the problem is with abstinence-only (a phras...
New Medicare-Approved Prescription Drug Discount Card
June 9, 2004: The new Medicare-approved discount cards went into effect on June 1. They are the first step of a badly flawed but sometimes beneficial Medicare prescription-drug program, in which the U.S. government will spend hundreds of billions of ...
Abbott Laboratories Increases Norvir Price Fivefold
In an entirely unexpected move on December 4, 2003, Abbott Laboratories increased the U.S. wholesale price of its 100-mg capsules of ritonavir (Norvir®), to five times what it had been the day before -- and increased the price of the liquid formulati...
"Shy" Study Suggests New Treatment Mechanism
A careful study of 54 asymptomatic, HIV-positive gay men, published December 15, 2003, in the journal Biological Psychiatry found that "socially inhibited" individuals had a viral load setpoint eight times higher than others -- and a much worse respo...
Returning to Work After Disability: What You Should Know
Interview with Eric Ciasullo, manager of the San Francisco Department of Public Health's HIV/AIDS Return to Work Initiative. Ciasullo is currently Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Association of People with AIDS (NAPWA), and was recent...
Counterfeit Drugs: Check Combivir, Serostim, Epogen
Since May 10, pharmaceutical manufacturers and the FDA have been warning medical professionals and patients about wrongly labeled or counterfeit drugs.
Combivir: On May 10, GlaxoSmithKline announced that it had received four reports of bottles label...
Drug Patents and Developing Countries: New Proposal
A creative new idea on using existing patent laws and procedures to deal with the conflict between intellectual property and access to medication in developing countries was posted on the World Bank's Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics (...
Interview With Bob Munk From New Mexico AIDS InfoNet
In the three years since it started, the New Mexico AIDS InfoNet has become widely recognized as perhaps the best overall collection of single-page fact sheets on AIDS treatment information. It now maintains over 100 of them, each in English and Span...