Links to other sites on the WebBarcelona, Spain July 8, 2002:- A vaccine that offers at least partial protection against HIV could be available within a decade, but poor countries will be left without access for years longer unless manufacturing and distribution capacity is built now, a leading researcher said on Saturday. At a meeting ahead of the 14th International AIDS Conference here, Dr. Seth Berkley, founder and president of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), said that an effective vaccine is the only way to end the pandemic, which threatens to kill more than 68 million people between 2000 and 2020.
Barcelona, Spain July 8, 2002: - A study of young gay and bisexual men in major U.S. cities found that more than three-quarters of those infected with HIV were unaware they had the AIDS virus. The finding presented Monday during the first day of scientific sessions at the 14th International AIDS Conference in Spain is a worrying sign that the epidemic could be in danger of accelerating again in the United States. The study indicated that ignorance of infection among HIV positive gay and bisexual men was three times as common as previous estimates, which were based on HIV tests results of people entering the military or jobs that require screening. Those have indicated that one in four people were unaware they were infected, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which conducted the survey. The survey "helps explain, at least in part, why many young gay and bisexual men in the United States are becoming infected," said Duncan MacKellar, who led the study. "Many gay and bisexual men have HIV, most do not test frequently and ... are engaging in behaviors that can transmit the virus," he added.
Washington July 4th, 2002: - Another 45 million people will become infected with the AIDS virus in the next eight years, researchers predicted on Thursday but said this number could be slashed if good prevention programs were put into place right away. Education, distribution of condoms, testing and other programs all work to reduce the rates of HIV infection, and if such approaches were used more widely, 28 million new infections could be prevented, the researchers said. The reports, one published by the Global HIV Working Group and one in Thursday's edition of the Lancet medical journal, tie in with a United Nations report issued on Wednesday that predicts 70 million people will die of AIDS in the next 20 years. It said more than 40 million are currently infected. "We failed to act decisively in the early stages of the epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa, and now we are paying the price," said David Serwadda of Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, a co-chair of the Working Group. "But we still have an opportunity to save the next generation in Africa from AIDS, and to prevent runaway epidemics in India, Russia, and China." Dr. Helene Gayle, former head of the AIDS division at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and now at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said experts know what works -- they just have to persuade countries to act. "What will happen if we don't get aggressive? By the year 2010 we will have 45 million new HIV infections. But if prevention efforts are ramped up now, there will be only 28 million new cases," Gayle, who helped write the Working Group report, said in an interview. "We need a massive scale-up of what we know works."
Examples of programs that work include Brazil's awareness campaigns and efforts to make anti-HIV drugs widely available. "Brazil has witnessed significant declines in risk behavior, reductions in new infections, and increased demand for voluntary counseling and testing," the report reads. Uganda has a national AIDS awareness program that includes condom promotion and free counseling and testing, and has reduced the HIV rate among pregnant women in cities by about two-thirds. U.S. prevention programs have cut annual HIV infections by two-thirds since the mid-1980s. Mass media campaigns, promotion and distribution of condoms, school-based programs, use of drugs to protect newborns if their mothers are infected and peer counseling for sex workers have all been shown to work. Yet Gayle said estimates are that only one of every five people at high risk for catching HIV have access to means of preventing it, such as condoms. "It's not surprising when people say prevention doesn't work," she said. "Prevention works -- we are just not using it to its full potential." The nonprofit Gates and Kaiser Family Foundations pulled together 37 AIDS experts for the report, released ahead of the Global AIDS conference that begins in Barcelona, Spain, later this week. The Lancet report was written by a team of experts at the World Health Organization, the joint United National Program on AIDS, the U.S. Census Bureau and Futures Group International. Over the first four years, the total cost of the recommendations is estimated to be $8.4 billion. After that it would cost $4.8 billion a year, the groups estimated. Overall, this would amount to $1,000 per infection prevented, which is far less than the cost of treating someone with HIV or AIDS. "We shouldn't accept that the nature of the disease is to go on. We can do something about it that can substantially alter the course of the epidemic," Dr. Bernhard Schwartlander, director of WHO's Department of HIV/AIDS, told a telephone conference.
Esmailabad, Iran June 22, 2002: - A powerful earthquake in northern Iran killed at least 500 people and injured 1,500 on Saturday, razing dozens of mountain villages whose mud-brick homes crumbled to dust. The death toll was set to rise, said the official IRNA news agency, with many people still trapped in rubble created in an instant by a quake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale. Helicopters and rescue teams rushed to search for survivors in the grape-growing area around the epicenter Avaj, 130 miles due west of the capital Tehran but far further by road. The quake struck in the early morning, just before 7:30 a.m., killing many women, children and elderly at home whilst men were out working in the fields and vineyards. Villagers in Esmailabad, 10 km north of Avaj, recovered 38 bodies -- one in nine of the population -- and picked through the dusty ruins to look for more of the missing, feared trapped among the wooden roof joists that jutted into the air. Mohsen, 12, is now alone -- his three sisters, brother, mother, father and grandmother all died but he had set out for school. Wide-eyed, silent and shaking, he stood before the tangled rubble of his home nestled in the fertile mountains. "I've lost everyone," another man wailed as he poured earth over his head. Women squatted in the dust, crying out as they rocked back and forth. A Muslim cleric read a prayer for the dead laid out in the village square before relatives buried them on a hill. IRNA said some 60 villages around Avaj had been razed to the ground or lost at least half of their buildings, with a pair of early strong aftershocks inflicting more damage.
OVERWHELMED: A medical official in Qazvin, the regional center, said 206 dead had been taken to one hospital in the city and 170 to another. The town's Red Crescent head, Majid Shalviri, told IRNA more than 500 people were now confirmed dead in the natural disaster. Ambulances screamed along the road to Qazvin, delivering more dead and wounded to hospitals from which patients able to move were discharged to make room. A town of 3,600 people, Avaj is close to the top of a high pass through rugged mountains, with the nearest peak towering 2,860 meters above. Its hospital was overwhelmed. "We have 100 beds in the hospital, but they keep bringing more people every minute, but we can't handle any more," an official there told Reuters. Most houses in the region, famed for seedless grapes that grow on the mountainsides, are single-story and made of mud brick which experts say does not stand up well to quakes. Usually with this kind of building we lose a lot of people," Professor Fariborz Nateghi, a government advisor on earthquake engineering, told Reuters. "You lose the walls and the ceiling collapses...They are major killers." President Mohammad Khatami sent a message of condolence. He told Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mousavi-Lari to personally take charge of the "grave responsibilities, which the government and the nation have in this tragic event," IRNA said.
TURNED TO DUST: Earthquakes are a regular occurrence in Iran, which is crossed by several major faultlines, but rarer in this region. On May 10, 1997, a tremor measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale killed 1,560 people in eastern Iran near the Afghan border. Qazvin, like Tehran, sits in the foothills of the Alborz mountain range, which skirts the south coast of the Caspian Sea. Experts say earthquakes here are infrequent, but that means pressure in the faultlines builds up, giving them extra force. In Esmailabad, Maryam, a teenager, was lucky to survive. Her mother, sister and sister's two children were crushed to death. "The ground started to shake and we wanted to run away but we couldn't," she said. "They found me because my hand was sticking out of the rubble and pulled me out." One man and his wife fled their home just in time. "We threw ourselves outside," the man said, "and saw that instead of a village there was just dust."
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