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The road to HIV infection

Roger — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:24:11 +0000

Being infected with HIV is not just a question of having unsafe sex with someone who is HIV+. Such reductionist approach ignores the complex set of factors, circumstances and events that lead to unsafe sex to take place. This concept map tries to survey these factors starting from the remote to the more intimate. As always, this is a work in progress and comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Microbicides for HIV Prevention

Roger — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:02:31 +0000

Microbicides are compounds that can be applied inside the vagina or rectum to protect against sexually transmitted infections (STIs) including HIV. They can be formulated as gels, creams, films, or suppositories. Microbicides may or may not have spermicidal activity (contraceptive effect). At present, an effective microbicide is not available (WHO definition)

PrEP, An Overview

Roger — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:51:16 +0000

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is an experimental HIV-prevention strategy that proposes using antiretrovirals (ARVs) to reduce the risk of HIV infection in healthy uninfected people at risk of acquiring the virus. PrEP is not proven to work and is currently being tested in HIV-negative people in several clinical trials across the world. It is a controversial strategy that raises many hopes but also many questions (Updated May 1, 2010).

For further information check the PrEPWatch Website.

Barriers to condom use

Roger — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:58:25 +0000

To use or not to use a condom for sexual intercourse is the result of a combination of several interacting factors. From the rational decision to choose not to use condoms to that of not being able to choose to use them, there is a broad range of possible accounts.

Addressing poor condom use therefore is not a question of simply promoting them but a question of knowing and understanding these numerous factors, their interactions and additive effects and ultimately understanding what leads people to do what they do or can do in their individual situation with their own perspectives, understanding, resources and options.

Biological Factors Affecting HIV Infection

Roger — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:15:28 +0000

Several factors are important in determining if the HIV virus can be passed from an infected person to another one. These include biological and social factors which both relate to the exposed and the “infector” individuals.

This conceptual framework summarises only the biological factors that influence HIV transmission. When assessing the risk of infection, each should be considered in turn and as a whole.

Exposure alone is not enough to predict the risk of infection, viral load maters and though there is no direct correlation between viral load and infectiousness, a high viral load has been associated with higher infectiousness. However, a low viral load may not be underrated if exposure is direct through blood, like with IDUs.

When it comes to sex with an HIV-infected person or a person of unknown status, different levels of risk have been attributed to different sexual practices. But this does not mean that the risk is always the same for the same practice. Oral sex may be overall much safer than unprotected anal sex, but oral sex with bleeding teeth and rotten gum isn’t certainly safe!

By and large, there is no clear cut or definitive risk factor and often risk is what we estimate it to be and how we relativise it. The risk of HIV infection is dynamic and depends on many factors who weight differently. Though there is an agreement that some factors weight more than other this cartoon does not give a weight to each factor identified as this is open to debate and only add to the existing confusion around risk.

Knowing and understanding what these factors are and how they interact one with another to determine the overall level of risk of HIV infection when exposed to the virus, particularly during sexual intercourse, will help individual to assess the risk of being infected.

Diseases of Poverty

Roger — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 21:32:10 +0000

A conceptual framework for understanding the diseases of poverty. Despite tremendous technological and scientific progresses in the understanding of diseases and their management, millions of people in the developing world still die of preventable infections and food scarcity whilst millions of other in the developped world die of diseases of opulence and excess.

HIV Prevention, an Overview

Roger — Sun, 24 May 2009 11:00:44 +0000

HIV prevention goes far beyond the simplistic ABC message that hijacks most of the media attention. This figure tries to illustrate the breadth and diversity of the field of HIV prevention (Click to enlarge). It would still need to be further expanded to really cover all the aspects of an ever growing field.

The Reactome

Roger — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 11:00:21 +0000

The Reactome project is a collaboration between Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, The European Bioinformatics Institute, and The Gene Ontology Consortium to develop a curated resource of core pathways and reactions in human biology.

Project Summary: curation of the IRS/PKB cascade of events (6 months).

Role: Supervision and contribution to the work.

The information in the Reactome database is authored by biological researchers with expertise in their fields, maintained by the Reactome editorial staff, and cross-referenced with PubMed, GO, and the sequence databases at NCBI, Ensembl and UniProt. In addition to curated human events, inferred orthologous events in 21 non-human species including mouse, rat, chicken, fugu fish, worms, fly, yeast and E.coli are also available.

This work involved:

researching the literature
summarising the published knowledge in a synthetic format
training and directing the work of a student

The results of this project is now available online to the scientific community.