News & Updates

Hope springs yet again in the field of HIV treatment, as another HIV patient (reportedly the fourth in the world) goes into remission 3 decades following diagnosis. The patient stopped antiretroviral therapy (ART) after receiving allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HCT) of CCR5-Δ32/Δ32 donor cells for acute myelogenous leukaemia (AML).

Immunizations with mRNA-based vaccines are strongly effective against symptomatic and severe COVID-19 disease associated with the virus’ Delta variant, according to a recent Singapore study.

Patients with abnormalities in coagulation parameters such as prothrombin concentration (PC) and D-dimer (DD) levels are at greater risk of more severe COVID-19 infection and subsequent death, reports a recent study.

Temporarily discontinuing methotrexate treatment for 1 week appears to induce satisfactory response to a seasonal influenza vaccine in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), with a similar effect as a 2-week interruption schedule, according to a study.

Surrogates of SARS-CoV-2* – a lipid enveloped RNA bacteriophage (Phi6) and two animal coronaviruses (CoVs; MHV and TGEV**) – survived in cold-storage temperatures for 30 days, a study finds, highlighting the risk of viral survival on food products and potential transmission on humans upon consumption.

There appears to be a twin-peak prevalence profile (TPP) for diseases of the stomach, including Helicobacter pylori (Hp) infection, gastric cancer (GC), gastric intraepithelial neoplasia (GIN), and gastritis, according to a recent China study. The first peak typically occurs during middle-adulthood while the second peak happens in late life.

Ignorance and fear of HIV both contribute significantly to the negative attitudes towards men who have sex with men (MSM) living with the virus, suggests a study presented at the 24th International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2022) in Montreal, Canada.

The long-acting combination of cabotegravir plus rilpivirine, administered as monthly or once-every-2-months jabs, appears to be effective in both older and younger patients living with HIV, with most maintaining virologic suppression through week 96, according to pooled data from the phase III ATLAS, FLAIR, and ATLAS-2M studies.