Clinical trials hoping to identify a vaginal microbicide that is both safe and effective against HIV have all but skirted questions befitting the evaluation of an approach intended primarily for sexually active women of childbearing age: What if a woman becomes pregnant while using a product? Can exposure to a product, especially early in pregnancy, pose a risk to the developing fetus?

Various intervention strategies have been implemented to curb the rise of HIV, and a factor that might affect exposure to interventions is gender. A new study in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology reviewed the behavior of participants exposed to various HIV brochures.

Adult circumcision is safe in HIV-infected men without advanced HIV disease, according to research published in PLoS Medicine.

Soon after an individual becomes infected with HIV the virus infects cells in the brain and spinal cord (the central nervous system [CNS]). Although this causes no immediate problems, during the late-stages of disease it can cause dementia and encephalitis (acute inflammation of the brain that can cause death).

A mapmaker and a mathematician may seem like an unlikely duo, but together they worked out a way to measure longitude – and kept millions of sailors from getting lost at sea. Now, another unlikely duo, a virologist and a biophysicist at Rockefeller University, is making history of their own.

By identifying a protein that restricts the release of HIV-1 virus from human cells, scientists believe they may be closer to identifying new approaches to treatment. The research is published in the advance online edition of Nature Medicine.

A team of scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has discovered new details about how a simian strain of the AIDS virus replicates. The findings are significant because they suggest new strategies to prevent replication, and because they are applicable to human strains of the virus, which, despite the persistent efforts of scientists over two decades, can only be slowed by drug treatments but neither cured nor prevented.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have discovered that adding tiny bits of gold to a failed HIV drug rekindle the drug's ability to stop the virus from invading the body's immune system.

Advanced BioScience Laboratories, Inc. (ABL) and the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) report that their unique HIV vaccine formulation was effective in eliciting strong and balanced immune responses in healthy human volunteers. The findings are published in the journal Vaccine (“Cross-subtype antibody and cellular immune responses induced by a polyvalent DNA prime–protein boost HIV-1 vaccine in healthy human volunteers,” Vaccine online, May 22, 2008.

On the 25th anniversary of the first scientific article linking a retrovirus to AIDS, Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, reflects in an essay in Nature on his experience treating and studying HIV/AIDS for the past quarter century.

Gamers have devoted countless years of collective brainpower to rescuing princesses or protecting the planet against alien invasions. This week researchers at the University of Washington will try to harness those finely honed skills to make medical discoveries, perhaps even finding a cure for HIV.

Infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which leads to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), is an epidemic of global concern. According to the most recent estimates, released in November 2007, by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 33.2 million worldwide are living with HIV infection currently.