HIV risk: Study

Washington: There is not enough evidence to show that circumcision reduces; the risk of AIDS in sex be- ! tween men, researchers are reporting, even though pre­vious studies in Africa have shown its pronounced ben­efit in reducing AIDS from heterosexual sex.

"Over all, we're not find­ing a protective effect asso­ciated with circumcision for gay and bisexual men," said Gregorio A Millet t of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the lead au­thor of a report that appears Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical As­sociation.
The researchers based their conclusions on a re­view of 15 studies involving 53,567 gay and bisexual men in eight countries, including the United States, where nearly half of the 1.1 million people infected with the AIDS virus are men who have sex with men.

Circumcised men were 14 per cent less likely to be infected with the human im­munodeficiency virus, or HIV, than those who were uncircumcised, but the find­ing was not statistically ! significant, the researc­hers said.
Studies showed that male circumcision halved the risk of female-to-male HIV in­fection.

Experts say this reduced HIV risk may be because cells on the inside of the foreskin are especially sus­ceptible to HIV infection. Gay and bisexual men play a much larger role in AIDS in many countries outside of Africa, Reuters

AIDS Cancer Expert Bagged Nobel

Two French scientists who discovered the AIDS virus and a German who found the virus that causes cervical cancer were awarded the 2008 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology on monday.

Luc Montagnier, director of the world Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, and Reancoise Barre-sinoussi of the Institute Pasteur won half the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($ 1.4 million) for discovering the deadly virus. Herald zur Hausen of the University of Duesseldorf and former director of the German Cancer Research Center shared the other half of the prize for work that went against the current dogma as of cervical cancer. “The three laureates have discovered two new viruses of great importance and the result of that had led to an improved global health,” said Jan Andersson, a member of the noble Assembly at sweden’s Karolinska Institute. “We have reached two of the laureates, the two men, and they were both very, very happ,” Anderson said on Monday.

The award marks a vote for Montagnier in a long-running dispute over who discovered and identified the virus, Montagnier or Dr Robert Gallo. Then of the US National Cencer Institute. Montagnier and gallo each accused the other of working with contaminated samples and it took a meeting of two presidents—then Jacques Chirac of France and Ronald Reagan of the Us—to persuade and National Institutes of health and the Institutes Pasteur to share royalties for the discovery.



NAME – Herald zur Hausen
Francoise BarreSinoussi
Luc Montagnier

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