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AIDS panel reiterates call for prison needle exchange

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

By Carol Sanders, Winnipeg Free Press
February 3, 2010
Source: Montreal Gazette
WINNIPEG — The longer Parliament is on hold, the longer prison inmates are sharing dirty needles and diseases with the community at large, former prisoners and health advocates say.

The Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network was supposed to appear Tuesday before the Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security calling for a needle exchange where inmates can trade dirty needles for clean ones.

“Prorogation swept us off the table,” said spokesman Gilles Marchildon. “Every day we delay in taking a better approach is a day where more prisoners are contracting HIV and hepatitis C.”

Prison employees and, eventually the public at large, are also at risk, he said.

“Ninety per cent (of inmates) get back into the community,” Marchildon said. “This is a grave public health matter.”

Inmates also have at least 10 to 20 times higher rates of HIV and hepatitis C than the population as a whole.
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Read more: Montreal Gazette

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Vaccine stops TB in African HIV trial

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Last Updated: Friday, January 29, 2010
Source: CBC News

An experimental vaccine helps prevent tuberculosis in people infected with HIV, researchers have found.

The Mycobacterium vaccae, or MV vaccine, reduced the rate of tuberculosis by 39 per cent among 2,000 people infected with HIV in Tanzania, researchers said in Friday’s online issue of the journal AIDS.

Tuberculosis accounts for up to a third of AIDS deaths worldwide, and TB worsens HIV, according to the World Health Organization.

“Development of a new vaccine against tuberculosis is a major international health priority, especially for patients with HIV infection,” said the study’s lead investigator, Dr. Charles Ford von Reyn of Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, N.H.

The vaccine includes an inactivated form of the bacteria.

It was tested in 2,013 HIV outpatients in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, who were vaccinated with the traditional TB vaccine (called Bacillus Calmette-Guérin, or BCG) shot as children. Participants were followed every three months for an average of 3.3 years.

In the seven-year, randomized, placebo-controlled trial study, 33 were infected with TB among those who received the experimental vaccine, compared with 52 given a placebo.

The immunization was well tolerated with no increase in the rate of serious adverse events, and there was no harmful effect on HIV viral loads, the researchers said.

The study is the first to show that any type of vaccine can prevent an infectious complication of HIV in adults, Von Reyn said.

Next, researchers need to improve manufacturing methods to produce larger amounts for further studies, and potentially for clinical use, if it is approved by regulators.

The study was sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Armed conflicts have an impact on the spread of tuberculosis: the case of the Somali Regional State of Ethiopia

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Author: Abdi GeleGunnar Bjune
Credits/Source: Conflict and Health 2010, 4:1
Source: 7th Space Interactive

A pessimistic view of the impact of armed conflicts on the control of infectious diseases has generated great interest in the role of conflicts on the global TB epidemic. Nowhere in the world is such interest more palpable than in the Horn of Africa Region, comprising Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya and Sudan.

An expanding literature has demonstrated that armed conflicts stall disease control programs through distraction of health system, interruption of patients’ability to seek health care, and the diversion of economic resources to military ends rather than health needs. Nonetheless, until very recently, no research has been done to address the impact of armed conflict on TB epidemics in the Somali Regional State (SRS) of Ethiopia.
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Conclusion: Patients from conflict zones have a longer delay in receiving a diagnosis of TB and have higher levels of self treatment utilization.

This suggests that access to TB care should be improved by the expansion of user friendly directly observed therapy short-course (DOTS) in the conflict zones of the region.

Yukon fights TB spread with control team

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Tuesday, January 26, 2010 | 5:17 PM CT
Source: CBC News

Health officials in the Yukon are working to stop the spread of tuberculosis in the territory, which has one of the highest infection rates in Canada.

Chief medical officer Dr. Brendan Hanley said the Yukon currently has 26 active cases of TB in three undisclosed rural communities.

Two nurses in a special TB control unit are travelling to affected communities and working with local nurses to treat those who have the disease.

But of greater concern, Hanley said, is about 30 other people who are at high risk of contracting the contagious airborne disease, or carry the germ that causes TB, and potentially develop the full-blown illness.

“These are the people that need extra follow-up, extra support,” Hanley told CBC News in an interview that aired Tuesday.

“This is really where we’re putting our money at the moment, is on following these 30 or so people who are high risk contacts for TB, high risk for developing active TB, who face addictions issues, and who really need to be closely followed.”

Hanley said many of the people health officials want to help are chronic alcohol users who may not have permanent homes and are in poor health.
Skyrocketing rates

Hanley said TB rates in the Yukon have skyrocketed in the last few years, with infection rates “well above the national rates by manifold.”