So there’s this fellow—an inquisitive sort, even if not particularly bright—whom one day is asked by his ogress of a wife to drive to the store to buy a ham. Obediently, he does so, finds an impressive specimen of meat at the store, returns home and, grinning widely, places it proudly on the kitchen table [...]

Cross-posted from Nature Medicine‘s Spoonful of Medicine blog Results from two trials released today provide the first evidence that taking antiretroviral drugs can prevent HIV infection among heterosexual men and women. The preventative strategy, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), was first shown to be effective among gay men. But PrEP suffered a setback in April [...]

The FDA has just announced approval for the OraQuick In-Home HIV test, by OraSure Technologies. That’s great news on some fronts, but the test raises new questions, as well. As I’ve just been catching up on my vacation reading with Marya Zilberberg’s helpful new book, “Between the Lines,” the first thing that caught my eye [...]

Evidence for the long-term health benefits of circumcision for newborn boys has been mounting for years. Today the influential group the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) declared that the procedure is, indeed, beneficial—and that it should be covered by public and private health insurance plans. The recommendation was published online August 27 in Pediatrics. Previously [...]

Condom use, earlier treatment and increased education have gone a long way to reducing HIV spread in the U.S. Nonetheless, some 4,000 inhabitants of New York City still became infected with HIV in 2009. Injection drug users make up a small portion of the new infections (just over 4 percent in NYC, and about 9 percent [...]

Thumbi Ndung’u left Kenya 1995 to study medicine at Harvard. He later returned to Africa on a mission to exploit HIV’s vulnerabilities. Now the head of the HIV Pathogenesis Program at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, Ndung’u spoke with Scientific American contributor Brendan Borrell about a research breakthrough early in his career that [...]

The number of people who die from HIV-related causes each year in the U.S. is now down to about 12,700—from a peak of more than 50,000 in the mid-1990s—thanks to condom education and distribution campaigns, increased testing and improved treatments. But now a different infectious disease is quietly killing even more people than HIV is: [...]

Wednesday marks the 22nd annual World AIDS Day. In the past year several scientific advances have helped rekindle convictions that progress is being made against the spread of HIV and AIDS. Last week researchers presented findings in The New England Journal of Medicine that prophylactic antiretrovirals—along with counseling and other prevention services—reduced HIV infection rates [...]

DNA evidence has been used to link suspects to crime scenes and even to people they might have infected with HIV. Now, using tools from evolutionary biology, researchers have shown that they can establish the direction of transmission of HIV in criminal cases involving men who intentionally infected women partners during unprotected sex. A new [...]

There is no question that HIV is an ugly virus in terms of human health. Each year, it infects some 2.7 million additional people and leads to some two million deaths from AIDS. But a new album manages to locate some sonic beauty deep in its genome. Sounds of HIV (Azica Records) by composer Alexandra [...]

Babies born to mothers with HIV have a much smaller risk of getting the virus themselves if medical personnel administer preventive drugs, such as nevirapine, at birth to the moms and their newborns. Nevertheless, a small percentage of those infants will end up getting the disease anyway. And without treatment, some 62 percent of HIV-positive [...]

A vaginal microbicide can cut HIV infection rates by 39 percent in women, researchers announced Monday. And female study participants who inserted the gel as directed reduced their chances of contracting HIV by more than half (54 percent). The news is a stunning, positive development— especially for women at risk for sexual transmission—in a field [...]

HIV infects an estimated 430,000 infants and children worldwide each year. Although many of those cases are contracted from an HIV-positive mother during pregnancy or birth, some 40 percent of infected children get the disease through breast-feeding. But because of health risks associated with formula feeding—especially in resource-poor regions—the World Health Organization still recommends breast-feeding [...]

World AIDS Day is approaching on December 1. As I was looking up more about World AIDS Day and awareness and testing guidelines/suggestions, I discovered there are several other similar days for awareness including National HIV Testing Day (NHTD), June 27, an annual observance to promote HIV testing. There are also days set aside for [...]

Artist Luke Jerram is a UK-based sculptor whose glass sculptures of microscopic life make the invisible visible. I was instantly transfixed by his sculptures’ delicacy and intense beauty. For me, something is captured in these sculptures that is lost in the false-color scanning electron microscope images we typically see of viruses and other extremely small [...]