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Nigeria Releases 57M Polio Vaccines, Aims To Increase Vaccine Coverage

The Nigerian government recently released 57 million doses of the trivalent oral polio vaccine for a nationwide campaign that concluded on Sunday, Nigeria’s Guardian newspaper reports. Additional campaigns are scheduled for July, August and October (Muanya, Guardian, 5/28). The Guardian published a related article exploring the government’s plans to “shore up immunization coverage in the race to meeting the health-related [U.N.] Millennium Development Goals of reducing significantly child and maternal deaths by 2015″ (Muanya, Guardian, 5/29).

Jakarta Post Examines Indonesia’s Provision of Health Care

Although a recent World Bank report highlights Indonesia’s “struggles to maintain and improve important health outcomes for the poor and achieve the Millennium Development Goals,” the report also finds “Indonesia’s growing economy, political stability and decentralization prospects now allow it to think expansively about healthcare,” the Jakarta Post reports. The article examines the Indonesian government’s “highly ambitious” plan to offer free medication to all citizens through the expansion of community health insurance and three World Bank-suggested approaches that would help the Indonesian government reach their goal by 2013 (Jakarta Post, 5/29).

Report Estimates Potential Impact of Circumcision Effort in Botswana on HIV/AIDS

Botswana’s campaign to circumcise nearly half a million men by 2012 will prevent almost 70,000 new HIV cases by 2025, according to a report published Thursday in the Journal of the International AIDS Society, AFP/Yahoo! News reports. The government’s national campaign aims to circumcise 460,000 boys over the age of five, and the country has begun airing television and radio advertisements to encourage men to be circumcised at local clinics. “Scaling up safe male circumcision has the potential to reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS in Botswana significantly,” according to the study. The report puts the estimated cost of the circumcision campaign at about $47 million (AFP/Yahoo! News, 5/28).

This information was reprinted from globalhealth.kff.org with kind permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Global Health Policy Report, search the archives and sign up for email delivery at globalhealth.kff.org.

© Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.

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Indonesia To Host International Congress On AIDS

Indonesia will host the 9th International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific region, August 3 - 13 in Bali, organizers of the event announced Wednesday, Xinhua reports. Indonesia was selected to host the congress because it “was one of the first Asian countries to develop a far-sighted national policy that provided legal immunity for people living with HIV to seek medication officially in appointed institutions,” according to Xinhua (Xinhua, 6/3).

Minister of Health Calls for Tougher Enforcement of Public Smoking Ban in Ghana

Ghana’s Minister of Health George Sipa Yankey on Monday called for increased enforcement of the regulations that ban smoking in public spaces to help reduce the dangerous effects of secondhand smoke, the New Times reports. “Government in line with its commitment to move Ghana forward strongly supports all earlier directives that sought to ban tobacco use in public places and assures us of our commitment to lead the crusade against the tobacco epidemic,” Sipa Yankey said (Baidoo, New Times, 6/2).

This information was reprinted from globalhealth.kff.org with kind permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Global Health Policy Report, search the archives and sign up for email delivery at globalhealth.kff.org.

© Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.

Latent HIV genes can be ’smoked out’ of human cells. The so-called ’shock and kill’ technique, described in a preclinical study in BioMed Central’s open access journal com/96/buy_retrovir/”>Retrovir ology, might represent a new milestone along the way to the discovery of a cure for HIV/AIDS.

Dr. Enrico Garaci, president of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (the Italian Institute of Health) and Dr. Andrea Savarino, a retrovirologist working at the institution, worked with a team of researchers to study the so-called “barrier of latency” which has been the main obstacle to HIV eradication from the body.

Cells harbouring a quiescent HIV genome are responsible for HIV persistence during therapy. In other words, HIV-1 genes become pieces of the human organism, and many scientists have simply thought there is nothing we can do. Dr Savarino’s team aimed to ’smoke out’ the virus in order to render the latently infected cells targetable by the immune system or artificial means. They write, “This can be achieved using inhibitors of histone deacetylases (HDACs), which are a class of enzymes that maintain HIV latency. However, their effects on HIV are evident only when used in toxic quantities”.

To overcome this problem, the Italian researchers tested a collection of HDAC inhibitors, some of which specifically target only certain enzyme isoforms (class I HDACs) that are involved in HIV latency. The toxicity of this approach, however, was not markedly decreased, although it compromises a more limited number of cellular pathways. Moreover, at non-toxic quantities, class I HDAC inhibitors were able to induce the ‘awakening’ of a portion of cells within a latently infected cell population. The researchers then repeated the experiment adding a drug inducing oxidative stress, buthionine sulfoximine (BSO). The results showed that BSO recruited cells non-responsive to the HDAC inhibitors into the responding cell population. An important result was that the infected cells’ ‘awakening’ was followed by cell death, whereas the non-infected cells were left intact by the drug combination.

“I really hope this study may open new avenues to the development of weapons able to eliminate the HIV-infected cells from the body”, says Dr. Andrea Savarino, “Such weapons, in combination with antiretroviral therapies, could hopefully allow people living with HIV/AIDS to get rid of the virus and return to a normal life. Of note, there are testable drug combinations composed of molecules that have passed phase I clinical trials for safety in humans”. This type of approach has been dubbed ’shock and kill’. “Although this type of approach is largely accepted by the scientific community”, adds Dr. Savarino, “to be honest, we have to take into consideration that some scientists are skeptical about this approach, and others even think that a cure for HIV/AIDS will never be found. Experiments using animal models will shed a new light on this difficult problem.”

Source: BioMed Central Limited