Indonesian AIDS patients face microchip monitoring

Indonesian AIDS patients face microchip monitoring
By NINIEK KARMINI – 22 hours ago

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Lawmakers in Indonesia's remote province of Papua have thrown their support behind a controversial bill requiring some HIV/AIDS patients to be implanted with microchips — part of extreme efforts to monitor the disease.

Local health workers and AIDS activists called the plan "abhorrent."

"People with AIDS aren't animals; we have to respect their rights," said Tahi Ganyang Butarbutar, a prominent Papuan activist.

But legislator John Manangsang said by implanting small computer chips beneath the skin of "sexually aggressive" patients, authorities would be in a better position to identify, track and ultimately punish those who deliberately infect others with up to six months in jail or a $5,000 fine.

The technical and practical details still need to be hammered out, but if the proposed legislation gets a majority vote as expected, it will be enacted next month, he and others said.

Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous country and has one of Asia's fastest growing HIV rates, with up to 290,000 infections out of 235 million people, fueled mainly by intravenous drug users and prostitution.

But Papua, the country's easternmost and poorest province with a population of about 2 million, has been hardest hit. Its case rate of almost 61 per 100,000 is 15 times the national average, according to internationally funded research, which blames lack of knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases.

"The health situation is extraordinary, so we have to take extraordinary action," said another lawmaker, Weynand Watari, who envisions radio frequency identification tags like those used to track everything from cattle to luggage.

A committee would be created to decide who should be fitted with chips and to monitor patients' behavior, but it remains unclear who would be on it and how they would carry out their work, lawmakers said Monday.

Since the plan was initially proposed, the government has narrowed its scope, saying the chips would only be implanted in those who are "sexually aggressive," but it has not said how it would determine who fits that group. It also was not clear how many people it might include.

Nancy Fee, the UNAIDS country coordinator, said the global body was not aware of any laws or initiatives elsewhere involving HIV/AIDS patients and microchips.

Though she has yet to see a copy of the bill, she said she had "grave concerns" about the effect it would have on human rights and public health.

"No one should be subject to unlawful or unnecessary interference of privacy," Fee said, adding that while other countries have been known to be oppressive in trying to tackle AIDS, such policies don't work.

They make people afraid and push the problem further underground, she said.

Tahi Ganyang, the Papuan activist, said the best way to tackle the epidemic was through increased spending on sexual education and condom use.

Associated Press Writer Irwan Firdaus contributed to this report.
Hosted by Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Drug War Chronicle - world’s leading drug policy newsletter

I consider the use of medical marijuana a highly scientific and political debate

I support legalization of marijuana by USA in all states.

StoptheDrugWar.org (DRCNet) is seeking enthusiastic volunteers for two important purposes:
Membership Drive: Do you live in Washington, DC or nearby? We need help from friendly drug reform enthusiasts who are willing to spend a couple of hours on one or more evenings working the phones for DRCNet's membership fundraising drive. This effort will take place on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings, starting this coming week. (No session on election day.) Volunteers will be calling previous DRCNet contributors. Come on out, enjoy free pizza and other snacks, make new friends, and help raise needed funds for the cause while gaining valuable phone-banking experience. E-mail borden@drcnet.org or call us at (202) 293-8340 ext. 301 for further information or to sign up.
Writers: In the second half of November or early December, StoptheDrugWar.org will be carrying out an ambitious week-long writing-based campaign dealing with the mainstream media's coverage of drug issues, and we are seeking a team of good volunteer writers to be part of it. Along with writing skills, volunteers for this project should have a fairly good understanding of the effects of drug prohibition -- visit our Site Map page and scroll down to the "Consequences of Prohibition" section to get an idea of what we mean by that. Contact David Borden at borden@drcnet.org or (202) 293-8340 ext. 301 for further information about this very exciting effort.

Joe Biden's Health

I watched Joe Biden tonight and I am sad to say my own father died and uncle died of aneurysms. He does not look healthy at all. If anyone should he carefully monitored in this campaign it should be Joe Biden. Interestingly enough, my father also was from the Scranton, PA area. Maybe it is the alcohol, gambling or mountains or hard life
or something in the water.
I am sad for Joe Biden, if anything he should not have accepted the nomination
Sarah Palin is young and smart and healthy. She is not a scholar but actually.. looking at W. it doesn't appear that one needs to have a high IQ and I am speaking as a Republican
OH well, I hope Joe Biden a stress test and have everything relooked at.. his eyes were puffy and he didn't look well.
see for yourself.
PS Pennsylvania people are NOT rednecks nor racists... they are coal minors and Italian and Irish and the back bone of society who immigrated here in the 1900s and the ones who made here to Ellis Island, like my dad's side of the family, who came here speaking Italian,, and then learned English, and worked coal mines and built bridges, and supported themselves by cooking, pizza restaurants, growing their own food, making Dandilion wine and living on tomatoes and invented Pizza crust,, now known as Foccocia, are tough SOBs and my father is a four star Bronze and Purple Heart,, after serving the WW2 and Korea, so I think I have a right to talk about it,, even though he didn't ,, I didn't know until after his death and I found his military papers. A real VETERAN. and I resent the implication as the daughter of an Army Hero, 100 per cent disabled upon retirement that PA people are racist.. never had I had a racist word in my life from him. I am glad he is not here to hear this nonsense.

German, 2 French researchers share Nobel Prize in medicine

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Germany's Harald zur Hausen and French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for discovering the AIDS virus and viruses causing cervical cancer.
French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier were cited for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV; while Germany's Harald zur Hausen was honored for finding human papilloma viruses that cause cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women.
The German medical doctor and scientist received half of the $1.4 million prize, while the two French researchers shared the other half.
"I'm not prepared for this," zur Hausen, 72, of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, told The Associated Press by telephone. "We're drinking a little glass of bubbly right now."
In its citation, the Nobel Assembly said Barre-Sinoussi and Montagnier's discovery was one prerequisite for understanding the biology of AIDS and its treatment with antiviral drugs. The pair's work in the early 1980s made it possible to study the virus closely.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Germany France Paris Sweden Stockholm Cambodia Oslo Nobel Prize Heidelberg anti-HIV Oliver Smithies Mario Capecchi Briton Martin Evans Nobel Assembly Luc Montagnier
That in turn let scientists identify important details in how HIV replicates and how it interacts with the cells it infects, the citation said. It also led to ways to diagnose infected people and to screen blood for HIV, which has limited spread of the epidemic, and helped scientists develop anti-HIV drugs, the citation said.
"The combination of prevention and treatment has substantially decreased spread of the disease and dramatically increased life expectancy among treated patients," the citation said.
The Nobel assembly said zur Hausen "went against current dogma" when he found that some kinds of human papilloma virus, or HPV, caused cervical cancer. He realized that DNA of HPV could be detected in tumors, and uncovered a family of HPV types, only some of which cause cancer.
The discovery led to an understanding of how HPV causes cancer and the development of vaccines against HPV infection, the citation said.
Barre-Sinoussi is director of the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Union at the Intsitut Pasteur in France, while Montagnier is the director for the World Foundation for Aids Research in Prevention, also in the French capital.
Barre-Sinoussi's father, Roger Sinoussi, told the AP that his daughter is visiting Cambodia this week.
"I am happy for her," he said, reached at her home in the Paris suburbs.
Alfred Nobel, the Swede who invented dynamite, established the prizes in his will in the categories of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace. The economics prize is technically not a Nobel but a 1968 creation of Sweden's central bank.
The awards include the money, a diploma and an invitation to the prize ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.
Nobel left few instructions on how to select winners, but medicine winners are typically awarded for a specific breakthrough rather than a body of research.
Last year's medicine award went to U.S. researchers Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies and Briton Martin Evans for work that led to a powerful and widely used technique to manipulate genes in mice, which has helped scientists study heart disease, diabetes, cancer, cystic fibrosis and other diseases.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed

'Fossil' HIV reveals virus history

'Fossil' HIV reveals virus history
Thursday, 2 October 2008 Bianca NogradyABC

The researchers found that the HIV viral sequences from two samples, which are almost 50 years old, differ significantly in their genetic makeup (Source: iStockphoto)
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A preserved specimen of lymph node nearly half a century old has revealed how rapidly the HIV virus has diversified, according to international research.
A team of researchers from around the world has been trawling through decades-old tissue samples from African hospital archives in the hope of finding samples containing the HIV virus.
They struck it lucky with a sample that was collected back in 1960, from a woman living in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This is the second-oldest sample of the HIV virus ever found - the oldest is from 1959.
The researchers found that the HIV viral sequences these two samples differ significantly in their genetic makeup.
Their finding appears in the latest issue of Nature.
Using a technique called molecular clock analysis, they were able to plot the two viral sequences' evolutionary path back in time to determine when they diverged.
They concluded the strains evolved from a common ancestor that emerged in Africa near the beginning of the twentieth century around 80 years before the disease appeared in western populations.
Fossil virus
Co-researcher and molecular palaeontologist Dr Michael Bunce, head of the Ancient DNA Laboratory at Murdoch University, Perth, says these early viral sequences tell scientists a lot about how the virus evolves.
"The more information we can find out about the evolutionary history of pathogens, [the] more we can understand how they've changed over time to adapt to humans," says Bunce.
"We can get a really good picture of those parts of the virus that are rapidly mutating and those that stay more constant."
While a 50-year-old sample seems relatively young compared to the fossil materials Bunce is used to working with, for a virus like HIV, it's ancient.
"HIV mutates so quickly that 40 to 50 years old is really akin to looking at fossil bone that's millions of years old," he says.
Extracting the viral genetic material from the samples was no easy task. The samples had been preserved in formalin, which can cause considerable damage to DNA sequences.
"What we have got is actually quite good considering the preservation status," Bunce says, but it required a lot of technological 'tweaking' to isolate the tiny snippets of DNA from the sample.
The international research team is continuing to analyse hundreds of samples in the hope of finding further HIV-positive tissue that could add more pieces to the puzzle.
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