Announcements

The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health announces a new executive education program entitled "Notorious Pathogens of Infectious Diseases: Detection, Treatment, Control and Eradication."

The global world makes infectious diseases a reality —one all have to contend with— and, because of interconnectedness, every country, health system, hospital, and overseas employer must be prepared for the next pandemic.  Yet, many are not.  Notorious Pathogens of Infectious Diseases has been designed to give participants the most current information needed to formulate an action plan in preparation for the world’s next outbreak.

On May 3-4, 2016, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) sponsored the Consultation on Global Trends of HIV Drug Resistance in Rockville, MD. The goals of the conference were to identify research gaps for HIV Drug Resistance (HIVDR) in low and middle income countries (LMIC) and to develop collaborations between key members of academia, government, industry, and non-profit organizations to address these gaps through an actionable plan.

Hepatitis B and C cause most cases of hepatitis in the United States and the world. The two diseases account for about a million deaths a year and 78 percent of world’s hepatocellular carcinoma and more than half of all fatal cirrhosis. In 2013 viral hepatitis, of which hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) are the most common types, surpassed HIV and AIDS to become the seventh leading cause of death worldwide.

Originally posted by International AIDS Society (IAS) here.

IAS blog entry by Sébastien Morin, International AIDS Society, Eliot Ross Albers, Independent (formerly at the International Network of People Who Use Drugs), and Jürgen Rockstroh, University of Bonn

HOW TO MEET THE FIRST-EVER GLOBAL HEPATITIS TARGETS

The first-ever global targets on viral hepatitis were adopted at the 69th World Health Assembly last week. These targets include:

• Reduce new cases of chronic hepatitis by 30% (2020) and 90% (2030) (baseline 2015). Reduce from 6-10 million new cases in 2015 to < 1 million in 2030
• Reduce hepatitis B (HBV) and hepatitis C (HCV) mortality by 10% (2020) and 90% (2030) (baseline 2015). Reduce from 1.4 million deaths in 2015 to < 500,000 deaths in 2030

Originally posted by International AIDS Society (IAS) here.

ADOPTED GLOBAL HEALTH SECTOR STRATEGIES FOR HIV, VIRAL HEPATITIS AND SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED INFECTIONS

Last week at the 69th World Health Assembly (WHA), the Global Health Sector Strategies for HIV, viral hepatitis and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), 2016-2021 were formally adopted on 28 May. 

This is an important milestone as the three strategies are fully aligned with supporting the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include targets to end the HIV epidemic as a public health threat by 2030 and to combat viral hepatitis and other communicable diseases, including STIs. The successful adoption of the three Global Health Sector Strategies for HIV, viral hepatitis and STIs provides an avenue for focused priority setting across the health response. These targets represent the following key benchmarks:

UNAIDS has released a new reference document, "The need for routine viral load testing."  The document is here.

Greatly expanded access to viral load testing will be a game-changer in the global response to AIDS.  Availability of viral load tests can improve treatment quality and individual health outcomes for people living with HIV.  

After just six issues, the Journal of Virus Eradication has been accepted on PubMed Central. 

This exciting news means that all content will be available on PMC, as well as be indexed by PubMed. Thank you to everyone for their hard work and commitment to the project, which reaped this wonderful reward. This is a continuing process and hopefully the path towards an impact factor.

UNAIDS recently released the Global AIDS Update 2016 today.  The document reports that treatment scale up continues and reached 17 million people, though this represents less than 50% coverage of people living with HIV and many millions are still in need of HIV treatment.  The report also states that there has been barely any recent decline in HIV incidence globally and a dramatic increase in incidence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. 

Jonathan Liu, MPH, an intern at the HIV Forum in 2015, was selected by the Division of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology of the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, as the 2016 recipient of the Sanford Elberg Award, an honor given to a public health student for the best Masters comprehensive paper.

NIH-Funded Study Will Test Safety, Efficacy of Vaccine Regimen

An early-stage HIV vaccine clinical trial in South Africa has determined that an investigational vaccine regimen is safe and generates comparable immune responses to those reported in a landmark 2009 study showing that a vaccine can protect people from HIV infection. Consequently, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and its partners have decided to advance the experimental HIV vaccine regimen into a large clinical trial. This new study, called HVTN 702, is designed to determine whether the regimen is safe, tolerable and effective at preventing HIV infection among South African adults. The trial is slated to begin in November 2016, pending regulatory approval.

“For the first time in seven years, the scientific community is embarking on a large-scale clinical trial of an HIV vaccine, the product of years of study and experimentation,” said Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of NIAID, part of the National Institutes of Health and a co-funder of the trial. “A safe and effective HIV vaccine could help bring about a durable end to the HIV/AIDS pandemic and is particularly needed in southern Africa, where HIV is more pervasive than anywhere else in the world.”