Hiv

Beyond the grave of Tim Richmond lies a trail of pretty women, following him into the ground. Fresh flowers rest beside the tombstone of one former lover. A second ex-girlfriend, still fighting for her life, has picked out her casket. At least two former partners are in seclusion on the East Coast, awaiting the inevitable. And there might be more to come, according to a story published in the Miami Herald yesterday. The Herald reported that Richmond, an auto racing star who died of AIDS seven years ago, infected numerous women with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

HE'S A COLLEGE kid and he likes to get hammered. He goes out at night and a few beer bongs, car bombs and hours of sleep later, he wakes up in bed with a dry mouth, pounding headache and a craving for fried food. Throw a stranger into the morning-after equation, and he's lucky if he doesn't wake up with HIV. For the alcoholically abstinent, the dehydration, headaches and morning-after munchies sound like a pretty unfortunate condition to be in. For him, the typical drinking college student, he has normalized blackouts and hangovers and become accustomed to laughing it off. With just a mildly crummy hangover, he feels lucky to have escaped the standard serious risks related to drinking.

  It's easy for most of us to forget that, not too long ago, an AIDS diagnosis meant certain death. Sue Kehler remembers. She was one of dozens of people, mainly extras, in the 1993 film Philadelphia who had the disease or were HIV positive. She may be the only one left. "It was an experience that made me feel special," she says, recalling how Tom Hanks saw her feeling woozy, asked if she'd eaten, and demanded a break. Jonathan Demme wanted his groundbreaking film - the first big production about AIDS - to reflect reality.

A SEPTA manager who is HIV-positive is suing the agency for invasion of privacy because a top executive there learned of the manager's illness by examining prescription records. The manager, who filed the federal suit under the pseudonym John Doe, is seeking unspecified damages, claiming the disclosure has placed him "under a dark cloud," his lawyer said. Before Judith Pierce, SEPTA's former chief administrative officer, learned of Doe's illness, Doe was "able to walk down those halls unafraid that people would shun him or wouldn't shake his hand or refuse to sit with him in the cafeteria," attorney Clifford A. Boardman told a jury of three women and five men. Pierce, who left SEPTA last summer for a similar job with the Los Angeles County Transit Authority, had no right to learn that Doe is suffering from the virus that leads to AIDS, Boardman said.

I first met Jonathan Lax five years ago, soon after moving to Philadelphia. I was new to the city, a young, naive gay man eager to report on the myriad of social issues affecting my community. I knew that AIDS held a hauntingly central focus for the gay community, and that if I was going to report on gay life, I would have to become intimately involved with the struggle against this devastating virus. What I didn't know was how much one man, Jonathan Lax, would play in exposing me to the multi-faceted complications of AIDS: the political, medical, social, economic and, ultimately, personal struggles against the disease.

When I was 16, I walked into a Philadelphia gym for the first time and told a trainer (who made Burgess Meredith's trainer in Rocky seem like Cary Grant) that I wanted to learn to box. In about a half-hour's time I was properly shod, cupped, gloved and ready to step into the ring. "OK," I asked, "What's lesson number one?" My mentor placed his hand on the small of my back and shoved me into the ring. An instant before the bell rang, I heard him grunt, "Protect yourself at all times.

The freeholders yesterday cleared the way for Burlington County's first treatment center for patients with HIV. Doctors from the Kennedy Memorial Hospitals Early Intervention Program are set to begin operating a satellite office in the county's Raphael Meadow Health Center on Woodlane Road in Westampton on May 2. Doctors, along with nurses from Community Nursing Services in Mount Holly, will be on hand on selected days of the week to treat...

Merck Inc., with headquarters in Whitehouse Station, N.J., and operations in the Philadelphia suburbs, said Monday that company researchers will collaborate with the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the University of California-San Francisco and seven other academic institutions to develop new approaches toward eradicating HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, is the primary funding organization, though Merck will not receive any funding for its participation.

Until recently there was no reason to believe that patients had any reason to fear contracting the AIDS virus from infected health-care workers. That is no longer the case. Recently three people in Florida, who tested positive for HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS), have been linked to a dentist who died of AIDS in September. No one ever viewed HIV-infected health-care workers carrying out "invasive procedures" as a possible additional risk factor for the transmission of the AIDS virus.

A fierce opponent to a planned residence in New Hope for eight HIV-infected people yesterday reopened the bitter 18-month-old battle by filing a lawsuit in Bucks County Court against the project. At the end of October, the New Hope Zoning Hearing Board gave the green light to open the facility. Marion Eichlin, who lives next door to the canary-yellow, two-story house at 30 Old York Rd. proposed for the residence, said in her appeal that the eight future residents of that house would not meet the legal definition of a family, thus making the project illegal under the borough's zoning laws.

A federal advisory committee on Tuesday unanimously approved over-the-counter sale of a rapid HIV test, acknowledging the need for new tools against an epidemic that is driven largely by people who don't know their status and infect others. If the Food and Drug Administration agrees with its advisers, the oral swab screening device made by OraSure Technologies Inc. of Bethlehem, Pa., would become the first infectious disease test approved for home use. The panel overcame considerable unknowns and concerns that the test cannot pick up newly acquired infections.

A federal advisory committee on Tuesday unanimously approved over-the-counter sale of a rapid HIV test, acknowledging public health workers' pleas for a new tool against an epidemic that is driven largely by people who don't know their status and infect others. If the Food and Drug Administation agrees with its advisers, the oral swab screening test made by OraSure Technologies Inc. of Bethlehem, Pa., would become the first infectious disease test approved for home use. The panel overcame considerable unknowns and concerns that the test cannot pick up newly-acquired infections to focus on a bigger picture.

A rapid home test for HIV, similar to early pregnancy tests, will be considered by a federal advisory committee on Tuesday, a move that many public health experts believe could eventually help calm Americans' fears of HIV, leading them to view it as just another serious chronic illness. An over-the-counter test offers new hope against an epidemic whose numbers in the United States have hardly budged in over 15 years. An estimated 50 to 70 percent of the more than 50,000 new HIV cases annually are transmitted by people who were unaware that they were infected.

For the first time, researchers have shown that they can suppress the AIDS virus by bolstering patients' immune systems, while taking them off standard antiviral drugs. The small, six-month-long study, led by scientists at the Wistar Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, put patients on interferon, an old drug with nasty side effects. Interferon by itself had not worked against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, in previous studies. The researchers can only speculate about why their protocol - which initially gave antivirals and interferon together - was effective.

Any trial in the case of the Delaware County teenager who has sued the Milton Hershey School for denying him admission because he is HIV-positive should be held in Philadelphia, his attorney contends. The school has asked U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, where the suit was filed, to move the trial to Harrisburg, about 15 miles from the boarding school founded by the famous chocolate merchant, and thus closer to key witnesses involved in the operation of the school. But in an opposing petition filed Monday, lawyer Ronda Goldfein said the move "would simply shift the inconvenience of a two-hour commute" to "a low-income family.

Robert E. Colcher, 84, of Center City, medical director of Valley Forge Medical Center & Hospital, died Monday, Feb. 6, of heart failure at Hahnemann University Hospital. In 1958, Dr. Colcher joined what was then Valley Forge Medical Center & Heart Hospital as chief of surgery. He became medical director in 1966 after the death of his father-in-law, Joseph Wolffe, the hospital's medical director and founder. In 1973, Valley Forge Medical Center changed its mission to providing treatment to adults with substance abuse and associated physical, social, and psychological disorders.

The Milton Hershey School said it was well aware that people with AIDS have been victims of "discrimination arising from ignorance. " But the boarding school founded by the nation's most-famous chocolate merchant insisted it nonetheless acted properly in denying admission to an HIV-positive Delaware County teenager. In its recently filed response to a lawsuit, the school said the case "requires a realistic examination of teen sexuality" and the "inability to control consensual sexual activity . . . in the unique residential setting.

Bob Ray Sanders is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram World AIDS Day, Dec. 1, was truly remarkable this year for several reasons - mostly good, but at least one bad thing. It was the day George W. Bush returned to Africa, a continent that benefited greatly from his unprecedented HIV/AIDS initiative; President Obama committed to a major increase in funding for treatment of HIV here at home. That's the good news. Also on that day, in a bizarre act that had nothing to do with HIV/AIDS, the world's largest human-rights organization made a complete fool of itself by calling for Bush's arrest.