The European Union has welcomed Libya's decision to lift death sentences against five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor convicted of infecting children with HIV, following a large compensation payout to the victims' families from an international fund.

The United States and the European Union have joined Bulgaria in calling for Libya to send home six foreign medics who have had their death sentences commuted to life in prison.

More than half of 426 Libyan families of children with HIV have already received compensation money in a deal paving the way for the release of six foreign medics sentenced to death for infecting the children.

With HIV infection driving a deadly resurgence of tuberculosis (TB), a new publication provides up-to-date recommendations for clinicians facing the many challenges of treating patients with both of these two complex diseases.

Nearly half of all people infected with HIV/AIDS are now women, the majority of whom contracted the disease through sexual intercourse with male partners. Especially alarming is the steady increase in HIV rates among women under the age of 25, a population considered one of today’s most vulnerable for acquiring the disease.

A growing number of drug-resistant strains of HIV are a threat to the effectiveness of current treatments despite anti-HIV drug cocktails decreasing the number of HIV-related deaths and improving the quality of life for HIV patients.

454 Life Sciences, a member of the Roche group, and a Yale School of Medicine researcher announced that they have used the company's Genome Sequencerâ„¢ system to identify previously undetectable rare drug resistant HIV variants in samples from an earlier performed clinical trial.

A targeted campaign of testing and counseling aimed at those who are at high risk for HIV would be more effective than the mass patient screening proposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to an analysis by David Holtgrave, PhD, an expert on HIV prevention at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently advised health professionals to offer every patient aged 13-64 years "opt-out" HIV testing (i.e. testing without the need for risk assessment and counseling).

As top officials from the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized countries gather in Germany for their summit meeting today, the main United Nations agency dealing with AIDS urged them to show continued leadership on the issue.

Like hobos on a train, HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, uses a pre-existing transport system to leave one infected cell and infect new ones, Hopkins scientists have discovered. Their findings, published in the June issue of Plos Biology, counter the prevailing belief that HIV and other retroviruses can only leave and enter cells by virus-specific mechanisms.

This is Global AIDS Week (5/20-26). It's an international effort to raise awareness about the pandemic and to call for greater resources to treat those who are infected with HIV, the AIDS virus.