HIV/AIDS News

Data indicate that fewer medical students and fellows are joining the HIV workforce, perhaps under the impression that HIV is no longer the exciting and rewarding field it once was. We asked Peter Chin-Hong, MD, professor of medicine and director of the transplant infectious disease program at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), what the “new HIV” is — the ID-related field that is attracting today’s young clinicians.

Fewer medical trainees are entering the field of HIV, leaving a shortage in the workforce that is likely to get worse, experts said. The trend coincides with slowed progress in reducing new infections, and likely complicates a lofty new federal plan to end the U.S. epidemic in 10 years.

President Trump’s proposed 2021 budget would reduce HHS funding by more than 9%, including large cuts to the NIH and CDC budgets. Reductions to some programs could impact the country’s ability to prevent and respond to public health threats and weaken support for global efforts to fight HIV/AIDS, observers warned.

The CDC’s Recommendations for Providing Quality Sexually Transmitted Diseases Clinical Service report highlights the important role of all health care providers in reversing the increasing trend of STDs in the United States and outlines which clinical services should be available in primary care settings.

The prevalence of neural tube defects, or NTDs, among children born to women with HIV was found to be the same as that among newborns from the general U.S. population, according findings published in MMWR.

For infants with HIV, early initiation of ART is crucial for viral suppression. However, results from a study published in E-Clinical Medicine showed that infants who started therapy at 2 days had similar outcomes as those who began ART up to 14 days after birth — suggesting that viral suppression can be achieved as long as therapy is initiated within 2 weeks of birth.

To kick off the new year, IDC has assembled a list of the 10 most-read stories of 2019. Please follow the links to access the full stories.

Children who were perinatally infected with HIV showed poorer scores on tests measuring cognitive ability, attention and motor function than their uninfected peers, according to results from a 2-year study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

A multisite prospective cohort study of more than 1,500 pregnant women with HIV showed that antiretroviral, or ARV, prescribing practices among this population do not align well with national guidelines, with less than 50% of pregnancies associated with appropriate ARV prescriptions.

NEW ORLEANS — A center with typically low HIV testing rates achieved a 15-fold increase in the number of adolescents screened for infection at well visits and a fourfold increase in screening at visits for both preventive and illness concerns.