The star-studded amFAR dinner, which was held last night in Cannes in the south of France, attracted celebrities such as Sean Penn, Kanye West and Karl Lagerfeld.

Taylor set up amFAR after her friend Rock Hudson died of AIDS in the early 1980s.

The charity has invested almost 250 million dollars (£138 million) in HIV and AIDS research since 1985.

The actress said at the time: “I am on a crusade against AIDS and I’ll battle forever even after a cure is found.

“Making people aware of the disease, and comforting and embracing sufferers, has been my greatest role off screen.”

The theme of this year is “Remembering Lives”  and the point is to remember how HIV has impacted the lives of so many of us and how international solidarity has a positive effect on the lives of people affected, directly or indirectly, by the virus.

Among the event organizers there are members of Aidshilfe and other international entities. This year, these groups seek to honor those we lost to AIDS and support those living with the disease.

The event program, which begins at 17 am, includes a candlelight ceremony and performances by the hand of several local talent (as Carlos Fassanelli and Virginia Koch). It is also planned intervention in the form of discourse by other special guests.

The International AIDS Candlelight Memorial, is one of the world’s largest grassroots movements against HIV and AIDS, spreading hope, developing leaders, and uniting communities. The Candlelight Memorial is coordinated by the Global Network of People living with HIV. Started in 1983, the Candlelight Memorial takes place every third Sunday in May and is led by a coalition of some 1,200 community organizations in 115 countries hosting local memorials to honor the lives lost and raise social consciousness about HIV. The Candlelight is also much more than just a memorial. It provides opportunities for leadership development, policy advocacy, partnerships, and improvement of community mobilization skills. With 33 million people living with HIV today, the Candlelight continues to serve as an important intervention for global solidarity, breaking down barriers, and giving hope to new generations.

Do not miss this opportunity and join us on a journey so emotional.

Directed by Giuseppe Storelli, an Italian who lives in Barcelona since 2002, Gayxample is a fun and exciting web series, is a reflection of the daily life of seven main characters, with their joys and sorrows, loves, drama, sex , dreams, relationships and family dynamics different from the gay perspective. Barcelona is a platform for the world that aims to entertain and leave an imprint on the viewer regardless of their sexual status.

“It’s an entertainment series with a tinge of drama,” says Ivan Yanez, the actor who plays the character of Toni. “It also aims to educate on various sensitive issues, including AIDS,” reveals the director. Still, he and his group of actors-many novice-acknowledges this comic spirit.

However, Gayxample tries to go further and aware to the cause. “While there is a homophobic point of view, are necessary projects like this,” explains Babeth Ripoll, the actress who is placed on the skin of a social worker rather peculiar.

The series will air every Saturday at midday through the website of the same name and will be subtitled in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch to get as far as possible through the network.

With this first season, his director Giuseppe Storelli hopes to raise funds to agree a second delivery Gayxample. Thus, the production team expected to get money through the sale of the soundtrack and DVD of the series, in addition to relying on third-party donations and aid from the government. “We’re doing an incredible propaganda Barcelona and the municipal government should recognize it,” says Storelli.

According to the AIDS Epidemiology Group at the University of Otago, 90 of the 149 new infections diagnosed last year were found in men who have sex with men.

HIV campaigners said that rates of the disease in gay and bisexual men were the worst they had ever been, surpassing even the 1980s.

The last highest rate was in 2008, when 93 gay or bisexual men were diagnosed with HIV.

Of this year’s total 149 infections, the source of 23 has not been confirmed but more than half are thought to have been transmitted through gay sex, which would make 2010 the worst year on record for gay/bisexual infection rates.

New Zealand Aids Foundation director Shaun Robinson said he had grave concerns for the safety of gay and bisexual men.

He said: “This epidemic has never been worse in New Zealand for gay and bisexual men.

“In addition to the 90 gay and bisexual men that we know about, there are another 15 men for whom the method of HIV transmission is unknown. It’s highly likely that most of them will be gay or bisexual men, which means that this will be the worst year on record.

“Not even in the early days of AIDS in the 1980s were rates of infection for gay and bisexual men this bad in New Zealand.”

He called for more HIV testing to catch the disease early.

“These men may have had HIV and been sexually active for a long time before they were diagnosed which means they missed out on treatment and were also likely to be more infectious.

“This situation could have been avoided by regular HIV testing.”

An estimated 1,800 people – most of them gay or bisexual men – are thought to be living with HIV in New Zealand.

A Recent Infection Testing Algorithm (RITA, sometimes also known as Serological Testing Algorithm for Recent HIV Seroconversion, or STARHS) works by looking for specific antibody markers, which give different results in the months immediately following infection. If a test gives a result below a pre-determined cut-off point, it is deemed to be a recent infection (approximately the last six months).

Nonetheless, because of person-to-person variability in the development of immune response, RITA cannot give definitive date for an individual’s infection. They are only able to suggest rough timings.

In 2008, the Health Protection Agency began the roll-out of STARHS, with the objective of it becoming part of the routine public health monitoring of all newly diagnosed HIV infections in the country.

The data presented the conference are based on samples from 2099 individuals, whom the HPA believe to be broadly representative, demographically and geographically, of people newly diagnosed in the UK. Samples were collected between February 2009 and May 2010.

Amongst gay and bisexual men, 16.1% of diagnoses were judged to be of recent infections. Similar proportions of recent infections were seen across all age groups.

Amongst heterosexual men and women, 6.2% and 6.8% respectively of diagnoses were of recent infections.

There appears to be a trend for recent infections to be more commonly identified in younger women (probably due to antenatal testing), but the age variations were not statistically significant. It is possible that when a larger number of samples can be analysed, statistically significant data will be available. Curiously, in women aged 50 or over, there was a relatively high proportion of recent infections, but this is based on a small number of cases and could be due to chance.

The cases of recent infection in heterosexuals were largely in people born in the UK, suggesting that new cases of heterosexual HIV acquired in the UK are mostly in people born in the UK. Heterosexual people born in Africa tend to have their infection diagnosed at a later stage.

Original post: http://www.aidsmap.com/page/1495851/

Gay and bisexual men who took a daily pill — either Viread or a placebo — were no more likely to take greater sexual risks on the assumption they were protected than those who didn’t take one, researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at theInternational AIDS Conference in Vienna today. The study also compared the rate of side effects between those who received Viread and those who got a placebo, and found no significant difference.

The study supports efforts to test whether drugs approved to treat AIDS patients can also be used to prevent infections in the first place. That theory, called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, was partially validated this week when a vaginal gel containing Viread was shown to reduce infections by 39 percent among women in South Africa.

“It is encouraging to hear there were no serious safety concerns and that the men in the study did not appear to increase risk-taking behaviors while taking a pill,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of the New York-based AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, in an e-mailed statement. “Much more safety, adherence and risk data will be needed before PrEP can be implemented if it is proven effective.”

400 Men

The study involved 400 HIV-negative gay and bisexual men in San Francisco, Atlanta and Boston. About half received either Viread or placebo immediately, and the other half started nine months later.

There were seven HIV infections overall, and none in the group that took Viread. The trial wasn’t designed to test whether the drug prevented infections and no conclusions about its effectiveness can be drawn from the study, the researchers said. The distribution of infections could be due to chance, said Lisa Grohskopf, a CDC researcher who presented the results.

“PrEP is one of the most-promising new prevention approaches being explored, and if effective, could help address an urgent need for additional solutions to help slow the HIV epidemic in the U.S. and around the world,” the CDC said in a statement.

Original text from: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-23/gay-men-don-t-engage-in-riskier-sex-when-taking-aids-pills-cdc-study-says.html

The gay community is very aware of HIV. Indeed, the infection used to go by the name of gay-related immune deficiency (Grid) before it was discovered to have been transmitted through other non-sexual means such as intravenous drug use. It seems that history can leave quite a mark, not just in the perceptions of individual members of society, but within the guidelines of public organisations too. It is still the case, although hopefully not for much longer, that once a man has had sex with another man, even with a condom, they are banned from giving blood for life. Both Nick Clegg and David Cameron have explicitly said that this ban must be relinquished to help address the low stocks in the blood bank.

Lewis’s comments are outdated, arguably by over 10 years. Once society grants a community a clear link to a deadly infection, as was the case with gays and HIV, that community increases its cautiousness. While the panic arising from the multiple diagnoses in the 1980s and 90s among gay men helped fuel the social perception among heterosexuals that HIV was “something that happened to them, not to us”, the picture today is very different.

In every year since 1999, most new diagnoses of HIV have been through heterosexual contact. Although many point out that a good chunk of these infections are believed to have been contracted abroad, statistically meaning that in the UK you are still less likely to be infected if you engage in heterosexual activities, the numbers are still very chilling. It proves convincingly that many heterosexuals do not consider HIV to be an infection likely to affect them. The myth of the gay disease may have heightened awareness of HIV among gays, but it has also sent a wave of complacency across the heterosexual community.

This perception is not just confined to the United Kingdom. Recent research commissioned by the New York City department of health showed worryingly that only 23% of women will insist on male partners using a condom during anal sex, compared with 61% of gay or bisexual men. These are not just slight differences. The ignorance over the dangers of HIV and the assumption that it is confined to homosexuals points towards a continuing sharp increase in heterosexual contractions of the infection – not through carelessness, but through ignorance. All public figures, including Lewis, should show an element of responsibility in killing the fiction surrounding HIV.

I am among the youngest people who still remember some remnants of the previous Conservative government, having left school just as section 28 was repealed. Since 1997, the Liberal Democrats and the Labour party have pursued the gay rights agenda vociferously, making every effort to carry public opinion wherever opposition was to be found. Cameron has already committed to revoking the gay blood ban, so surely he must therefore accept that the intrinsic link between HIV and the gay community is little more than an archaic misconception. It sets a worrying precedent indeed if, as he tries to carry public opinion on his apparent support for gay rights, he has yet to convince his own party.

Original post: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/01/hiv-not-gay-disease

By Ravinia Hayes-Cozier, Director of Government Relations and Public Policy

While we applaud the President’s request to increase HIV/AIDS funding by $40 million (1.7%) in the FY2011 budget, I am concerned that this number falls short after the 8 years of flat-funding under the previous Administration. Sometimes we count our blessings no matter how small they are, but we should never turn a blind eye to fully funding what is needed to care and treat and prevent HIV/AIDS. The budget, the framework of how we spend resources, impacts the major federal agencies that oversee HIV/AIDS programming in the U.S. As HIV/AIDS advocates, we must hold government officials accountable during the appropriations process: it is imperative that AIDS dollars are disbursed in a manner that reflects the impact of the epidemic.

This means ensuring that communities hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic receive the funding they need. In 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that HIV incidence was 40% higher than previously estimated, with over 55,500 new HIV cases occurring in the U.S. annually. Of these cases, 70% were in communities of color. African Americans alone accounted for just under half of all new HIV infections, followed by Latinos, who showed a significant increase in HIV incidence at 18%. Incidence rates among Asian and Pacific Islander and Native American/Alaska Native communities showed dramatic increases as well.

The AIDS community – and federal agencies – must look beyond HIV funding when it comes to mitigating HIV/AIDS in the U.S. We must address the socio-economic determinants that have undermined the overall health and welfare of communities heavily impacted by AIDS: lack of affordable housing; limited access to education and health care; and high rates of malnutrition, substance use, incarceration and poverty. These determinants have helped lay the foundation for HIV/AIDS in minority communities and must be addressed through appropriate resources – and the will of the AIDS community.

I believe that re-investment in America’s health infrastructure through health reform and increased HIV/AIDS funding will lead us into an era where sound public policy, evidence-based health and HIV/AIDS programming; and community meet and produce great outcomes.

For more information, please contact:

Ravinia Hayes-Cozier, Director of Government Relations and Public Policy

www.nmac.org, communications@nmac.org

National Minority AIDS Council, Washington, DC
202-483-6622 ext. 309