training day by M.A.C. - by Estee

Today, we had training by Malaysia Aids Council. i think, if questions were arrows, Zam, our trainer, would have been made a human pincushion. hello Zam! if u're reading this, thanks so much for the training! it was a blast =D

at night, we went to berjaya times sq. at starbucks, i met a a tall, dark, towering figure: a venti dark berry mocha frappe. ooh la la. luuurrvveee...

on the train back to UKM, i played a slapping game with Weilin. i think she is secretly one of the mutants in X-Men. her speed, strength and agility at the game where u slap each others hands is remarkable. i got trashed! but its really fun to play with weilin and as quoted from Andreas: "BRAVO." maybe, she learnt some kungfu. like "The Buddha Palm" or "Muhammed Ali Slap" or smth like that... float like a butterfly, sting like a Weilin.
so communications team, we better make our callings count. dun offend weiling, she can strip flesh from bone in one fatal swipe of her godly paw. *shivers in fear*

woohoo Red Project!

Meri's first week over - by Meri

I am now living in that phase of my internship where everything is perfect. People keep asking me about how I can take the differences like heat and spicy food and I have to admit that I actually like them. At the moment I am totally in love with everything exotic that I don't have in Finland, such as:
- small and extremely friendly and helpful people who are always ready to go crazy about photos
- eating every meal out, including breakfast
- jungle-like forest with roots above the ground and monkeys jumping around
- singing from mosques
- cats trying to get fed and stroked

This has also been a time for quite intensive learning about HIV and AIDS. Maybe the most striking thing so far was to hear about an African belief that if you have AIDS, you will get cured if you have sex with as young a virgin as possible. Of course, the people who try to get cured that way are just infecting more people. Maybe Africa will be my next stop..

Donate to Malaysian AIDS Foundation

Hi everyone,

Just to let you know that Digi came up with a "For Those who Love to Save" campaign where people can choose a charity body and Digi will donate RM5 to it. People can choose to support in a group or as an individual.

Under "The Red Project", we've created a group to support Malaysian AIDS Foundation as a way to show our commitment to the cause. Therefore, if you'd like to show your support to Malaysian AIDS Foundation under The Red Project, feel free to click on the picture below:


Let's do our very bit :)

Branding HIV-positive people in the buttocks?

There was an article very recently published in The Straits Times about a Swazi politician's call for HIV-positive people to be branded on the buttocks.

The article is as follow:

May 27, 2009
HIV branding call fuels debate

JOHANNESBURG - SWAZI residents were asked on Tuesday to debate a politician's call for HIV positive citizens to be branded on the buttocks, which has sparked an uproar in the small mountain kingdom.

The Times of Swaziland asked for feedback on best ways to combat HIV and rights to freedom of speech after Timothy Myeni told fellow politicians that all Swazis should be tested for HIV and their backsides marked if infected.

'I have a solution to this virus. The solution will come from a law that will make it compulsory to test for HIV. Once you test positive, you should be branded on the buttocks,' the member of parliament said last week.

'Before having sex with anyone, people will then check the buttocks of their partners before proceeding with their mission,' the newspaper reported him saying.

Landlocked Swaziland is one of the world's poorest nations with the highest HIV prevalence in the world under the rule of Africa's last absolute monarch King Mswati III.

Mr Miyeni, who leads a popular gospel group, has stuck to his call for compulsory HIV testing but apologised for the buttocks branding suggestion.

'I am very sorry for saying HIV positive people should be branded, I did not know it would turn out like this. I have seen that the suggestion was very offensive and many think I was discriminating, so I withdraw my statement,' he said last week.

Reader responses will be published in the Times of Swaziland next Tuesday, the newspaper said in its online edition. -- AFP

source: The Straits Times

It's always very interesting whenever you hear interesting suggestions on what should be done about HIV/AIDS and the suggestion above is no doubt extraordinary.

We'd like to know what you think about the article above.


Do you think branding HIV-positive people is an effective way to prevent HIV transmission? Why?

And while you are thinking about it, do take some of these points into consideration:

• What are the main ways of HIV transmission?
• How does branding of HIV-positive people addresses these way(s) of transmission?
• What are the effects of branding towards the HIV-positive person?

Speak up and be heard. Every opinion counts :)

AIDS Myths and Misunderstandings

Hey Guys! Have you ever wondered why are they so many AIDS myths? When AIDS became known, it was a very mysterious disease that caused the death of many people. Back then, there were many unanswered questions about the disease, people reacted with fear and came up with stories to back up their fear. And surprisingly, most of these had to do with how easy it was to become infected with HIV, while the truth is most of these are not true.

Transmission Myths

Many people believed that HIV and AIDS could be transmitted by a mosquito bite, by sharing a drinking glass with someone with AIDS, by being around someone with AIDS who was coughing, by hugging or kissing someone with AIDS, and so on. Transmission can only occur if someone is exposed to blood, semen, vaginal fluid or mother's milk from an infected person. There is no documentation of transmission from the tears or saliva of an infected person.

Myth: A woman with HIV infection can't have children without infecting them.
Reality: Without any treatment, HIV-infected mothers pass HIV to their newborns about 25% of the time. However, with modern treatments, this rate has dropped to only about 2%.

Myth: HIV is being spread by needles left in theater seats or vending machine coin returns.
Reality: There is no documented case of this type of transmission.


Myths About a Cure

It can be very scary to have HIV infection or AIDS. The course of the disease is not very predictable. Some people get very sick in just a few months. Others live healthy lives for 20 years or more. The treatments can be difficult to take, with serious side effects. Not everyone can afford the medications. It's not surprising that scam artists have come up with several "cures" for AIDS that involve a variety of substances. Unfortunately, none of these "cures" work. A very unfortunate myth in some parts of the world is that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. As a result, many young girls have been exposed to HIV and have developed AIDS. There is no evidence to support this belief.

Myth: Current medications can cure AIDS. It's no big deal if you get infected.
Reality: Today's medications have cut the death rate from AIDS by about 80%. They are also easier to take than they used to be. However, they still have side effects, are very expensive, and have to be taken every day for the rest of your life. If you miss too many doses, HIV can develop resistance to the drugs you are taking and they'll stop working.


AIDS Is a Death Sentence

In the 1980s, there was a very high death rate from AIDS. However, medications have improved dramatically and so has the life span of people with HIV infection. If you have access to antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) and to medical monitoring, there's no reason you can't live a long life even with HIV infection or AIDS.


Myths About Medications

It has been very challenging for doctors to choose the best anti-HIV medications (ARVs) for their patients. When the first drugs were developed, they had to be taken as many as three times a day. Some drugs had complicated requirements about storage, or what kind of food they had to be taken with (or how long you had to wait after eating before taking a dose). The reality of ARVs has changed dramatically. However, there are still some myths:

Myth: You have to take your doses exactly 12 (or 8, or 24) hours apart.
Reality: Medications today are fairly forgiving. Although you will have the most consistent blood levels of your drugs if they are taken at even intervals through the day, they won't stop working if you're off by an hour or two. However, people taking Crixivan® (indinavir) without ritonavir need to be very careful about timing.

Myth: You have to take 100% of your doses on time or else they'll stop working.
Reality: It's very important to take AIDS medications correctly. In fact, if you miss more than about 5% of your doses, HIV has an easier time developing resistance and possibly being able to multiply even when you're taking ARVs. However, 100% adherence is not realistic for just about anyone. Do the best you can and be sure to let your health care provider what's going on.

Myth: Current drugs are so strong that you can stop taking them (take a drug holiday) with no problem.
Reality: Ever since the first AIDS drugs were developed, patients have wanted to stop taking them due to side effects or just being reminded that they had AIDS. There have been many studies of "treatment interruptions" and all of them have shown that stopping your ARVs is very likely to cause problems. You could give the virus a chance to multiply or your count of CD4 cells could drop, a sign of immune damage.

Myth: AIDS drugs are poison and are more dangerous than the HIV virus.
Reality: When the first AIDS drugs became available, they weren't as good as current medications. People still died of AIDS-related conditions. It's true that some people get serious side effects from AIDS medications, but the death rate in the US has dropped by about 80%. Researchers are working hard to make HIV treatments easier and safer to use.

source taken from www.thebody.com

Just What Does H1N1 Mean For People Living With HIV/AIDS?

As a swine flu virus appears to make its way across the world, so has misinformation and confusion about what the virus is and what sort of threat it poses, partcularly with people living with HIV/AIDS. Below is an extracted article taken from an interiew with Dr Gallant, a professor of Medicine and Epidemiology in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the John Hopkins University of Medicine, USA.

What is Swine Flu?

Swine flu is just a new strain of flu that has not been circulating in the population. As a result, nobody has any immunity to it. It's an influenza virus, just like other influenza viruses, but it's just one that human beings haven't seen before and as a result, our immune systems don't have any memory of it and that makes us a little more vulnerable.


When it comes to people living with HIV then, how does this translate? Are people with HIV more at risk for coming down with swine flu?

Not really. HIV-infected people are not in general at greater risk of influenza or flu than other people. And that's in part because the cellular immune system, the part of the immune system that the CD4 cells comprise, is not really responsible for fighting the flu. As a result, HIV doesn't make you more susceptible. For most people with HIV, the swine flu is pretty much the same as it would be with somebody without HIV.

The only exception to that is that because people with HIV are at higher risk for pneumonia and because flu can increase your risk of pneumonia as a complication of flu, people with low CD4 cells could be at higher risk of complications of flu if they do get the flu and that the most important complication is pneumonia.

So the bottom line is that if you're HIV positive, but you're on HIV medications and doing well and have a reasonably good CD4, then there's probably not much to worry about. But if you're quite immunosuppressed -- if your CD4 is well below 200 -- then there is a slightly increased risk, but certainly not the same level as the risk of some other diseases like tuberculosis or something like that where the CD4 cells are so important.


It sounds like people living with HIV have a greater risk of not gettting swine flu necessarily, but of suffering implications related to it if they have a low CD4 count.

That's right, yes. The risk of getting the flu is the same.


So we are assuming the viral load does not make a different here?

Probably not much. Again, the viral load could contribute a little bit to the risk of complicated flu, if you had a high viral load. Although, I suspect the CD4 count would be a little more important.

Certainly at our clinic we try to vaccinate everybody against the flu, but in general, if you look at most influenza seasons, we really don't see a lot of people getting really sick from the flu. We don't really see a lot of need for hospitalization. And certainly, we don't see a lot of deaths.

So I think that with respect to the swine flu, it shouldn't be much different given what we know so far about this strain now. Although, again, this is a new epidemic and we may get more information as time moves along.


Are there any precautions for HIV-positive people need to take to protect themselves from swine flu?

It's pretty much the same as for anyone else. Normally I would say get a vaccination, but that's not available yet for this strain of flu, so the next best thing you can do is:

• Try to stay away from people who are sick.
• Wash your hands -- because hand contact is a very common way of spreading this.
• If there's flu going on in your community and you can avoid being in crowded places with a lot of people, that probably would help.

But short of that, there's not really much you could do.


Well is there anything else you'd want to tell the HIV-positive people listening to the swine flu craziness that's now overwhelming the news?

For the most part, I've been reassuring my patients that they don't really have to think about this fludifferently than anyone else. And that's in part because most of my patients are on HIV treatment and have undetectable viral loads and have decent CD4 counts. So for them, it really is not a special issue. It's an issue we all have to be concerned about.

I think so far the news from the United States at least is that this is likely to become a bigger epidemic than it is today, but so far it seems to be fairly mild. But given what's gone on in Mexico, I do think we have to be certainly vigilant about it. And I think that we'll just have to see over the next few days how things play out.

Source taken from www.thebody.com