Latest by John S. James
Greg Louganis, Chad Allen Speak About HIV and Depression; Note on Risks and Benefits of Antidepressant Use
Diver Greg Louganis and actor Chad Allen spoke about their struggles with depression at a public forum in New York (at the LGBT center on October 11), and will speak again in San Francisco on October 27, to raise awareness of the problem in the gay c...
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...
Institute of Medicine Urges Restructuring of U.S. Low-Income HIV Treatment and Care
A Congressionally mandated study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has urged that the U.S. replace the current patchwork of Medicaid and other funding mechanisms with an HIV Comprehensive Care Program having "a strong focu...
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 ...
Medicines for the World: A Way Forward
The current system of drug development and marketing has consistently failed poor countries, and also failed middle-income countries, where the great majority of people cannot obtain antiretrovirals1 and will be unable to afford new cancer and other ...
Antiretroviral Pipeline: New-Drug Reports From Retroviruses Conference
Here are short summaries on the three experimental antiretrovirals that were most discussed at the 11th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, February 8-11, 2004 in San Francisco. They received attention because they reported signi...
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...