HIV & AIDS

Newborns exposed to HIV during pregnancy or birth should receive preventive antiretroviral medication immediately after delivery to reduce the risk of transmission from mother to child.

Global deaths from AIDS have dropped to their lowest levels in more than 30 years, in part due to efforts to fight HIV. But U.S. funding cuts could soon reverse that progress, experts warn.

A recent study analyzes the extent to which HIV tests are conducted following the diagnosis of an HIV indicator condition (IC) in primary care, as recommended by the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. The article “Implicit bias in HIV testing based on indicator conditions in primary care: a population-based study in Catalonia, Spain, 2017 to 2021” was published in Eurosurveillance and led by researchers from the IGTP’s research group Centre for Epidemiological Studies on HIV/AIDS and STI of Catalonia (CEEISCAT) and IDIAPJGol.

A decades-long scientific challenge in HIV vaccine development has been finding a way to train the immune system to produce antibodies that can target many variants of the virus. Traditional approaches haven’t worked—largely because HIV mutates rapidly and hides key parts of itself from the immune system.

Worldwide, an estimated 40 million people live with HIV. Two-thirds of this group are on the African continent. In 2023, more than 600,000 people died from HIV-related causes and 1.32 million were infected. There is no vaccine against the world’s second most deadly infection, after TB. However, researchers from Amsterdam UMC have set an important first step in reaching that goal. The results of their phase one trial are published in Science.

A new commentary published in Annals of Internal Medicine from Roy Gulick, MD, Chief, Division of Infectious Diseases and Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, highlights what’s new in the updated CDC HIV Non-Occupational Post Exposure Prophylaxis (nPEP) Guidelines. According to Dr. Gulick, the streamlined nPEP guidelines should be part of general medical practice, as incorporating them will reduce new HIV infections and improve public health.

Tackling HIV continues to be a major public health challenge, mainly because the persistence of viral reservoirs means that people living with HIV need to take lifelong antiretroviral treatment. But some individuals, known as “post-treatment controllers,” are able to maintain an undetectable viral load even after stopping treatment.

HIV infections are lifelong and can weaken the immune system, causing a patient to be more susceptible to infection and various cancers. Children of mothers with HIV are at risk of developing an HIV infection as it is transmittable during labor and while breastfeeding.

The Trump administration is weighing elimination of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Division on HIV Prevention, sparking concerns among public health experts.

Nearly 85% of the 1.7 million adolescents with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa, along with half of the nearly 40 million people in the world living with HIV. Although the government in Uganda provides antiretroviral treatment (ART) for free, adherence to the regimen by adolescents aged 10–16 is low, increasing the potential for the virus to further spread.