A drug commonly used in the developing world to prevent transmission of HIV from mother to child persists in the breast milk and blood of the mothers, putting them and their babies at risk for developing drug-resistant strains of the virus, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Antiretroviral drugs for HIV do not increase the risk for coronary atherosclerosis, a central risk factor for heart disease, according to a study led by the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health to be published in the Aug. 8 issue of the journal AIDS and available online today.

Low-dose growth hormone treatment reduced abdominal fat deposits and improved blood pressure and triglyceride levels in a group of patients with HIV lipodystrophy, a condition involving the redistribution of fat and other metabolic changes in patients receiving combination drug therapy for HIV infection.

One of the major reasons that treatment for HIV/AIDS often doesn't work as well as it should is resistance to the drugs involved. Now, scientists at McGill University have revealed how mutations hidden in previously ignored parts of the HIV genome play an important role in the development of drug resistance in AIDS patients.

With tens of thousands due to gather in Mexico City Aug. 3 for the 2008 International AIDS Conference, the journal AIDS has published a special supplement that provides concrete recommendations for addressing the complex social and economic issues that fuel HIV.

Millions of people world-wide who have contracted a highly resistant strain of HIV could benefit from a new drug to treat the infection, according to UNSW research.

The life expectancy for patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has increased by more than 13 years since the late 1990s thanks to advancements in antiretroviral therapy, according to researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center have disproved a long-standing clinical belief that the hepatitis C virus slows or stunts the immune system's ability to restore itself after HIV patients are treated with a combination of drugs known as the "cocktail."

CD4+ T lymphocytes, or simply CD4 T cells, are the "brains" of the immune system, coordinating its activity when the body comes under attack. They are also the cells that are attacked by HIV, the devastating virus that causes AIDS and has infected roughly 40 million people worldwide. The virus slowly eats away at CD4 T cells, weakening the immune system.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is reshaping its research enterprise to broaden HIV vaccine discovery activities.

In resource-limited settings where tuberculosis is a major cause of mortality among HIV patients and where a multidrug-resistant TB epidemic is emerging, researchers are pressing for approaches to integrate TB prevention and treatment into HIV care and treatment.

When individuals infected with HIV become infected with a second strain of the virus, the two viral strains can exchange genetic information, creating a third, recombinant strain of the virus.