Information for your health

Coccidia are single-celled intestinal parasites that currently represent one of the greatest challenges to the broiler industry. To keep the level of infection low, farmers commonly add coccidia-inhibiting chemicals (coccidiostats) to broiler feed. While this does not kill the parasites, it greatly reduces the incidence of overt sickness and death from infection. While clinical coccidiosis is therefore not a problem, veterinary authorities have never been able to gauge the extent of subclinical coccidiosis and the consequences this may have for animal welfare issues and production costs.

The fight against the liver disease hepatitis C has been at something of an impasse for years, with more than 150 million people currently infected, and traditional antiviral treatments causing nasty side effects and often falling short of a cure.

Using a novel technique, medical and engineering researchers at Stanford University have discovered a vulnerable step in the virus' reproduction process that in lab testing could be effectively targeted with an obsolete antihistamine.

For a long time, the main obstacle to creating an AIDS vaccine has been the high genetic variability of the HIV virus. Dr. Jean-Pierre Routy and his team from the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), in collaboration with Dr. Rafick Sékaly from the Université de Montréal, have overcome this difficulty by designing a personalized immunotherapy for HIV-infected patients.

The team's findings were presented on August 5 at the XVII International AIDS Conference in Mexico City.

Antibodies found in lupus and some hemophilia patients may prove to be a potent preventative against HIV transmission and progression, according to researchers who presented two new studies yesterday at the 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico City.

The antibodies act on a particular part of HIV protein called gp120, which is the target of a vaccine that has failed to deliver any preventative effect as demonstrated in a large clinical trial. Gp120 is known to help HIV invade human cells.

Researchers from Utrecht University, The Netherlands, have developed a model that illustrates how HIV evades the immune system. The study incorporates detailed interactions between a mutating virus and the immune system.

HIV avoids recognition by the human immune response through the generation of viral variants called "escape mutants". This avoidance seems to thwart effective control of virus replication, causing HIV-infected patients to progress to AIDS. However, it remains difficult to fully understand the dynamics of immune escape, as data from infected patients is relatively sparse.

After soliciting and considering broad input from the scientific and HIV advocacy communities, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has determined that it will not conduct the HIV vaccine study known as PAVE 100. The announcement follows the failure last September of an AIDS vaccine candidate with some similarities to the PAVE 100 candidate in a Phase IIb trial known as STEP.

Recent studies have shown that HIV causes a vigorous and prolonged immune response that eventually leads to the exhaustion of key immune system cells--CD4+ and CD8+ T-cells--that target HIV. These tired cells become less and less able to fight the virus, and the cells' fatigue contributes to the inability of an HIV-infected person's immune system to clear the virus from the body.