Study finds virus can reach immune cells in just 4 hours
TUESDAY, Dec. 16 (HealthDay News) -- A new route of male-to-female transmission of HIV -- in which the virus can travel through healthy genital skin to reach immune cells in just four hours -- has been identified by U.S. researchers.
It's long been believed that the normal lining of the vaginal tract was an effective barrier to HIV during sexual intercourse, because the large HIV virus couldn't penetrate the tissue. But the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine researchers found that HIV can penetrate normal, healthy genital tissue to a depth where it can get to immune cells and infect them.
The researchers labeled HIV viruses with photo-activated fluorescent tags and were able to track the viruses as they penetrated the outermost lining of the female genital tract (the squamous epithelium) in female human tissue obtained through hysterectomy and in animal models.
The findings were expected to be presented Dec. 16 at the American Society for Cell Biology annual meeting, in San Francisco.
"This is an unexpected and important result. We have a new understanding of how HIV can invade the female genital tract," principal investigator Thomas Hope, a professor of cell and molecular biology, said in a university news release.
"Until now, science has really had no idea about the details of how sexual transmission of HIV actually works. The mechanism was all very murky," Hope said.
These findings, if confirmed in future studies, could help in the development of new microbicides and vaccines to protect women against HIV.
"We urgently need new prevention strategies or therapeutics to block the entry of HIV through a woman's genital skin," said Hope. While condoms are 100 percent effective in blocking HIV, "people don't always use them for cultural and other reasons."
Women account for 26 percent of all new HIV cases in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Based on its most recent analysis of 2005 data, the CDC estimated that there were 56,300 new HIV infections that year, and 31 percent were due to high-risk heterosexual contact. More than half of the new cases of HIV infection worldwide are in women.
More information
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has more aboutwomen and HIV.
Dec 21st, 2008 is "Global Orgasm Day" during the two hour period of the winter solstice transition. Timing varies based on your timezone, so check out the time here.
The day is designed to effect positive change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible instantaneous surge of human biological, mental and spiritual energy.
To find out more, check out Global Orgasm.
1. A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.
2. Men wake up as good-looking as when they went to bed. Women somehow deteriorate during the night....
3. A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he wants. A woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she doesn't want.
4. A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't. A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, and she does.
5. There are two times when a man doesn't understand a woman- before and after marriage.
6. A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband. A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.
7. To be happy with a man, you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman, you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all.
8. Any married man should forget his mistakes. There's no use in two people remembering the same thing!
9. A woman has the last word in any argument. Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.
10. Women look at a wedding as the beginning of romance, while men look at a wedding as the ending of romance.
By Philip D. Harvey
Sunday, May 12, 2002; Page B07
The abstinence-only sex education programs in our public schools call for "abstinence until marriage." The federal government spent $115 million on this message last year, and the Bush administration is proposing significant increases for the current year. Sexual abstinence until marriage is now official government policy.
The average age of marriage in the United States today is 27 for men and 26 for women. The abstinence-only program therefore asks our young people to renounce sexual activity throughout much of the early part of adult life.
Age 26 or 27 is an average. There are millions of Americans who do not marry until age 30, 35 or later. I myself did not marry until age 40. Had anyone suggested to me that I should remain sexually abstinent until that time, I would have found the idea preposterous.
Those who insist that sex education in our high schools be confined to exhortations to abstain from sexual activity might say they don't really mean abstinence until age 27 or age 30. What they really mean is abstinence during the younger years.
The problem with this approach is that it is dishonest. If those who assert that sex must be postponed until marriage really mean that sex should be postponed only until age 19 or 20 or 21, they should say so, and their message would be taken more seriously. They do not because their convictions dictate that sex outside marriage -- at any age -- is wrong and, if wrong, cannot be recognized. They may understand that it is unrealistic to expect abstinence until age 27, but they cannot permit themselves to alter their message to take that into account.
I wonder if those who seriously advocate abstinence until marriage would prefer to see the marriage age come down. It is in those cultures where marriage takes place at particularly early ages that abstinence until marriage is realistic. The average age of marriage in Bangladesh, for example, is 18. Under such circumstances abstinence until marriage is at least feasible.
But in modern industrialized societies, where women have educational opportunities and more than half attend college, marriage in the teenage years will likely become increasingly rare. If we agree, as I think most Americans do, that equal educational and occupational opportunities for women are a good thing, that our society is enhanced and enriched by these developments, then I think we must accept the fact that marriage in the middle or late twenties is the modern societal norm. If that is so, the expectation of sexual abstinence until marriage is utterly unrealistic.
I would argue also that such an expectation, when translated into a policy (such as federally funded sex education calling for such a restriction), is wrong. It is wrong to expect young people to be sexually abstinent until they are more than half way through their twenties. Sexual relations are an important component of human happiness, and there is no moral purpose served by abstaining from sex if two people are mature and responsible. Why should they be deprived of sex?
It is worth noting too that many of the reasons young Americans do not marry at age 17 or 18 or 19 are reasons compatible with much of America's traditional cultural agenda. Our youth are less inclined than they were some decades ago to marry hastily, perhaps to the wrong person. Instead, most young Americans wish to be sure that they have found the appropriate mate so that they may create an honorable and viable union. It is difficult to argue with such motivation. Even the practice of cohabitation prior to marriage, now very common in the United States, may be both a sensible and a moral practice, which makes the resulting marriage more likely to be happy and to endure.
In today's United States, a policy of abstinence until marriage is anachronistic. Abstinence until adulthood and then responsible, protected sex is the message we should convey.
Philip D. Harvey is a writer and businessman.
