LIVING WELL

Exercise is activity that you do on a regular basis (every day, or several times a week) for the purpose of improving your health.

We all know that it is important to take care of ourselves. When we eat right, get good rest and exercise, we feel better! It’s easy to know this, but harder to live by it when you are HIV+. HIV drugs can have debilitating side effects, or simply make you tired. When we are sick, it’s often even harder to take good care of ourselves than when we are well. Our families need us, our jobs need us – and we have a habit of putting ourselves last. Learn to put yourself at the front of the line. If not first, at least nearly first! You’ll feel better and you’ll have more to give everyone else.

HIV/AIDS CAUSE DEBILITATING ILLNESS

Over the past 25 years, nearly 25 million people have died from AIDS.1 HIV/AIDS causes debilitating illness and premature death in people during their prime years of life and has devastated families and communities. Further, HIV/AIDS has complicated efforts to fight poverty, improve health, and promote development by:2
Diminishing a person’s ability to support, work and provide for his or her family. At the same time, treatment and health-care costs related to HIV/AIDS consume household incomes. The combined effect of reduced income and increased costs impoverishes individuals and households.


Deepening socioeconomic and gender disparities. Women are at high risk of infection and have few options for providing for their families. Children affected by HIV/AIDS, due to their own infection or parental illness or death, are less likely to receive an education, as they leave school to care for ailing parents and younger siblings.


Straining the resources of communities – hospitals, social services, schools and businesses. Health care workers, teachers, and business and government leaders have been lost to HIV/AIDS. The impact of diminished productivity is felt on a national scale.
Through unprecedented global attention and intervention efforts, the rate of new HIV infections has slowed and prevalence rates have leveled off globally and in many regions. Despite the progress seen in some countries and regions, the total number of people living with HIV continues to rise.
In 2007, globally, about 2 million people died of AIDS, 33 million were living with HIV and 2.5 million people were newly infected with the virus.1


HIV infections and AIDS deaths are unevenly distributed geographically and the nature of the epidemics vary by region. Epidemics are abating in some countries and burgeoning in others. More than 90 percent of people with HIV are living in the developing world.3


There is growing recognition that the virus does not discriminate by age, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status – everyone is susceptible. However, certain groups are at particular risk of HIV, including men who have sex with men (MSM), injecting drug users (IDUs), and commercial sex workers (CSWs).


The impact of HIV/AIDS on women and girls has been particularly devastating. Women and girls now comprise 50 percent of those aged 15 and older living with HIV.1


The impact of HIV/AIDS on children and young people is a severe and growing problem. In 2007, 420,000 children under age 15 were infected with HIV and 290,000 died of AIDS.1, 4 In addition to the estimated 2.1 million children living with HIV/AIDS, about 15 million children have lost one or both parents due to the disease.1, 4


There are effective prevention and treatment interventions, as well as research efforts to develop new approaches, medications and vaccines.


The sixth Millennium Development Goal (MDG) focuses on stopping and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS by 2015.


Global funding is increasing, but global need is growing even faster – widening the funding gap. Services and funding are disproportionately available in developed countries.

HAVING 12 CHILDREN

Having 12 children and a very old mother to support, Vincent, middle-aged Ugandan single father living with HIV, knows that his death would spell disaster for the whole family. “If I had died, where would these people go?” said VincentN perched on a stool with his legs outstretched

Fortunately, Vincent has survived. He said it is DART that has saved his life. DART, the Development of Antiretroviral therapy in Africa, is the largest HIV treatment trial ever carried out on the world’s second most-populous continent.

The DART trial has recently reached a remarkable finding in HIV treatment: that taking HIV treatment does not have to be accompanied by regular laboratory tests, at least for the first two years.
James Hakim, professor of the University of Zimbabwe Medical School and co-principal investigator of DART, said the health economists in the DART team who have analyzed the trial data have concluded that a third more people could be successfully treated for HIV in Africa if expensive lab tests weren’t used routinely. “The challenge now is for policy-makers to widen availability of ART,” said the professor.

Before, it was believed that a person on HIV treatment should have regular tests, including CD 4 cell counts, a measure of how well the body’s immune system, which is damaged by HIV, is working.

The DART results show that 87% of people receiving HIV treatment without routine blood test monitoring were still alive and well after five years, only 3 percentage points less than in the group that had routine blood test monitoring. This finding suggests that many more people living with HIV in Africa could receive treatment for the same amount of money that is currently spent on routine lab tests used to monitor the effects of antiretroviral therapy.

It could also lead to antiretroviral therapy being delivered safely and effectively by trained and supervised health workers in remote communities where routine laboratory tests are not available due to high costs or poor resources.

Professor Peter Mugyenyi of the Joint Clinical Research Centre in Uganda, also a DART co-principal investigator, agreed that governments now have evidence that expensive blood tests aren’t needed routinely for HIV treatment to be successful and safe. “It also means that treatment could be delivered locally as long as health care workers have the right training, support and supervision,” said Peter, “This could make a huge difference to people who live in remote areas that are many days walk from the nearest hospital or laboratory.”

According to UNAIDS estimates HIV treatment only reached a third of the 9.7 million people in need at the end of 2007. In Africa alone, around 4 million people urgently need antiretroviral therapy but the resources are limited.



The DART Story

Aiming at finding a safe, simple and more economical way of carrying out HIV treatment, the DART trial began six years ago when treatment for people living with HIV was just starting to become more widely available in Uganda and Zimbabwe.

Vincent was one of the 3,316 DART participants that had severe or advanced HIV infection while not having previously had any antiretroviral therapy. He is also one of the main characters of The DART Story, a newly launched documentary film narrated by Annie Katuregye. The narrator herself, whose husband died of AIDS-related illnesses seventeen years ago at the age of 34, joined the DART trial in Uganda in 2003.

HIV/AIDS

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in African American communities is a continuing public health crisis for the United States. At the end of 2006 there were an estimated 1.1 million people living with HIV infection, of which almost half (46%) were black/African American [1]. While blacks represent approximately 12 percent of the U.S. population, they continue to account for a higher proportion of cases at all stages of HIV/AIDS—from infection with HIV to death with AIDS—compared with members of other races and ethnicities [2, 3].
The Numbers
HIV/AIDS in 2007
Blacks accounted for 51% of the 42, 655 (including children) new HIV/AIDS diagnoses in 34 states with long-term, confidential name-based HIV reporting [3].
Blacks accounted for 48% of the 551,932 persons* (including children) living with HIV/AIDS in 34 states with long-term, confidential name-based HIV reporting [3].
For black women living with HIV/AIDS, the most common methods of transmission were high-risk heterosexual contact** and injection drug use [3].
For black men living with HIV/AIDS, the most common methods of HIV transmission were (in order) [3]:
sexual contact with other men
injection drug use
high-risk heterosexual contact**.
Race/ethnicity of persons (including children) with HIV/AIDS diagnosed during 2007
Note. Based on data from 34 states with long-term, confidential name-based HIV reporting.
AIDS in 2007
Blacks accounted for 49% of the estimated 35,962 AIDS cases diagnosed in the 50 states and the District of Columbia [3].
In 2007, the rates of AIDS diagnoses decreased among blacks but were still higher than the rates of any other race/ethnicity. The rate of AIDS diagnoses for black adults/adolescents were 10 times the rate for whites and nearly 3 times the rate for Hispanics. The rate of AIDS diagnoses for black women was 22 times the rate for white women. The rate of AIDS diagnoses for black men was almost 8 times the rate for white men [3].
Blacks accounted for 44% of the 455,636* people living with AIDS in the 50 states and District of Columbia [3].
By the end of 2007, 40% of the 562,793* persons with AIDS who died were black [3].