Any hope for infants with HIV-positive mothers?

Formula feeding is cheap and available in developed countries. In other parts of the world, because access to clean water, formula and antiretroviral therapy (ART) is not easy and breast feeding as an option is cheap and comes with known health benefits, many mothers resort to breast feeding even while infected with the HIV virus.

What hope can there be for millions of children at risk? Last month, the Mississipi baby who was thought to have been cured of HIV, disappointingly, was reported with detected levels of the virus. This poses a challenge to pediatric health specialist to proffer new immune-based protective strategies, new vaccines for delivery to children at risk of being infected with HIV virus through breast milk, to think up new ways to boost potentially protective maternal antibodies.

While seeking answers to these challenges, foremost at the minds of these health workers are the effectiveness, facility of administration and the safety of whatever strategies they can think up, even if HIV-preventive nutritional supplements are expected to be part of the offerings.

One fact is clear: in view of the recent news about the Mississipi girl, new strategies have to be pursued to help children at risk of infection with HIV virus through breast milk.

Further reading: Scientists call for new strategy in pursuit of HIV-free generation.

The Immune system versus HIV virus – an unbalanced equation.

What would happen when the police are ill-equipped to combat terrorism? Terrorist become rampageous. That is the situation between the immune system and the HIV virus. Because CD8+ T cells which are responsible for combating and killing the HIV virus are ill-equipped to fight and kill HIV-infected cells, it has not been easy to cure HIV infections.

The problem lies at the doorsteps of instigator and regulatory transcription factors. Transcription factors are responsible for protein synthesis and two of them, T-bet and Eomes, are responsible for development of CD8+ T cells when an HIV infection is detected by the immune system. T-bet is an instigator in that it makes the CD8+ T cells equipped to fight, like in providing them with the right armory and equipment, while Eomes are regulatory in nature because it serves as a memory bank for earlier battles. We could say Eomes make the CD8+ T cells smart.

Unfortunately, the T-bet transcription factor which are supposed to turn the tables in favor of the immune system fails us. When the time to fight arrives, they are exhausted and unable to complete their task. Hence, the CD8+ T cells become ill-equipped to fight and are defeated even while smart.

Like in combating Nigerian terrorism, it is necessary to equip them with better armory and better training. Otherwise, the immune system would not have the opportunity of killing HIV-infected cells that would make it easy to cure HIV.

Further reading: Why the immune system fails to kill HIV.

Porn can ruin your life. Is it addictive?

When volunteers and persons who regularly watch pornographic content were shown short sexually explicit videos, their brain activity being monitored using functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI), it was found that watching porn to excess produces the same brain activity as drug addiction. Does this mean that pornography is as addictive as hard drugs?

An answer to this question is important. One in 25 adults show compulsive sexual behavior. They are obsessed with uncontrollable sexual thoughts, feelings or behavior. Furthermore, difficulty in controlling sexual behavior can affect one’s life and relationships.

The conclusion arrived at after the study using pornographic videos was that pornography can ruin your life, just like abusing drugs or being a slave to food. But proving that pornography is addictive like hard drugs or diagnosing someone who is addicted to pornography was beyond the reach of the researchers.

Further reading: Brain activity in sex addiction mirrors that of drug addiction.

Fighting HIV infections through seminal bacteria

Semen contains sperm, immune factors and communities of bacteria. The latter two have been studied for their effect or relationship to the amount of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in semen or what is termed, the viral load. It was decided that infection with HIV re-shapes the relationship between semen bacteria and immune factors which in turn affects the viral load.

A recent study was a research on the relationship between semen bacteria and HIV infection using semen samples from 49 men who have sex with men (MSM). The MSM population was pertinent because of its high risk to HIV infection and transmission. Thereafter, some were put on anti-retroviral therapy (ART) for 6 months.

Both men discovered that persons infected with untreated HIV have markedly reduced seminal microbial diversity . After 6 months ART therapy, semen viral load was found reduced to undetectable levels while bacterial diversity in the semen was restored.

This result supports the hypothesis that seminal bacteria plays a role in HIV shedding and should be a possible target in the fight against HIV transmission through sexual activity.

Further reading: The Semen Microbiome and Its Relationship with Local Immunology and Viral Load in HIV Infection.