HIV/AIDS - The African Mirror

May

14

2021

People with HIV are still dying from a treatable, but neglected, disease: all it needs is a plan

THEMBI Ngubane was a young woman who became famous through the American National Public Radio show Thembi’s AIDS Diary: A Year in the Life of a South African Teenager. She was vibrant, punchy, full of life. She recorded the consultation when, as a doctor, I started her on antiretroviral therapy in 2005. Jo Menell’s documentary film, Thembi, gives a sensitive and nuanced account of her fast rise to fame, culminating in meeting Barack Obama and addressing the US Congress, and then equally rapid fall into oblivion, loss from care, and death. GILLES VAN CUTSEM, Honorary Research Associate, Centre for Infectious…

Feb

19

2021

By The African Mirror

‘AIDS Patient Zero was not African’

NEWS

HUGO GREENHALGH AS World Health Organization scientists comb the Chinese city of Wuhan for the first cases of the coronavirus, a Canadian infectious disease expert believes he has found the source of another pandemic, HIV/AIDS, more than a century earlier. In a revised edition of his 2011 book "The Origin of AIDS", published last month, Jacques Pepin questions the "cut hunter" theory that the blood of a chimpanzee likely infected someone with the simian variant of HIV in Cameroon in the early 20th century. He now believes it is likely that the first instance of the zoonotic transmission of the…

Jan

30

2021

By The African Mirror

Pioneering AIDS researcher and doctor Joseph Sonnabend, 1933-2021

HEALTH

HUGO GREENHALGH PIONEERING AIDS researcher Joseph Sonnabend, one of the first doctors to warn of the emergence of a new virus in the late 1970s, has died at the age of 88 in a London hospital. Sonnabend first noticed the rise in the number of similar illnesses among his gay male patients at a private sexual health clinic he had founded in Greenwich Village in downtown New York. But his warning in 1979 went unheeded. "I wrote to the city health department, asking, 'Are people reporting this? Am I the only one seeing this? Is there something going in the…

Dec

23

2020

By The African Mirror

Are COVID-19 vaccines safe for people living with HIV?

HEALTH

RACHEL SAVAGE AS the first COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out around the world, HIV/AIDS experts and advocates have sought to reassure those living with HIV that they can safely get the coronavirus vaccination. Some countries have recommended that HIV-positive people should be given priority for vaccination against COVID-19 once the most at-risk groups - the elderly and frontline healthcare workers - have received their shots. Germany has said HIV-positive people will be included in a third tier of priority patients - along with the over-60s, people with conditions such as heart, kidney and liver disease, and those working in key…