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Heart Health

02/03/2020 By ACOMSDave

Last month where I work dedicated the whole month to make people aware of how to look after their heart

Heart
The Heart Not Working

Heart disease is dependent on two factors:-

  • non-modifiable risk factors
  • modifiable risk factors

Modifiable risk factors include elements that we cannot change such as age, family history and ethnicity. Modifiable risk factors include:-

  • Type Two Diabetes
  • High Cholesterol
  • Tobacco
  • Excessive alcohol
  • Overweight
  • High Blood Pressure

What can you do about it? Look into these steps:-

  • Get a regular check-up with your doctor
  • Be active – 150 minutes of good activity per week – build it up in blocks daily
  • Quit smoking – get help to stop!
  • Eat a nutritional, balanced diet. If you need help, ask your doctor to refer you to a support group
Heart

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Filed Under: Community Journalist Tagged With: health, Heart

HIV+ HIts The News Media Again!

02/12/2015 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

hiv-positiveSo our news media yet again show that headlines and ratings comes before the well being of someone, in this case it was Charlie Sheen who was forced to admit that he was HIV+.
Charlie had done nothing wrong, had not broken any laws, indeed from everything I have been able to read, he has been extremely sensible in his actions and in his advice to subsequent partners once he discovered that he had the virus.  However, the news media loved the hype, and the speculation, indeed my observation is that they went out of their way to play the situation up and to expand their readership.
…
HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) is a virus that attacks and weakens the body’s immune system (the body’s disease fighting system). HIV makes it difficult for your body to fight against infections and cancers that it would normally be able to fight off.
If a HIV positive person does not get proper treatment, the virus may progress to AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome). AIDS is a disease in which the immune system breaks down and the body is unable to fight off certain infections.
According to the latest figures, 320 people were diagnosed with HIV in Ireland in 2011.  That means that around 6 people are diagnosed every week with HIV. Globally, there are 34 million people currently living with HIV.

  • Your partner or one night stand can be HIV positive and not know it. Always use condoms.
  • You can be HIV positive and not know it, so if you’re sexually active it’s a good idea to have regular STI check-ups.
  • Once you have HIV, you are infected for life and have the potential to infect others….

What treatment can you get?

  • There is no cure for HIV and AIDS, but there is treatment available that helps to slow down the progress of HIV.  This treatment is called HAART (Highly Active Retroviral Therapy) or ‘the cocktail’. It works to stop the virus spreading within your body and it  requires keeping to a very strict medication schedule.
  • You will generally attend a specialist HIV clinic every three months or so to get testing done and your treatment monitored. They will also be able to advise you on safer sex and other practicalities of living with HIV. You can also get emotional support from hospital social workers and HIV organisations.
  • If you are pregnant and HIV positive, you can also receive treatment during pregnancy and labour that will help to prevent the risk of your baby being infected by the virus. You need to talk to your doctor about the available options. Your partner and recent partners should also be tested….

HIV+ is a virus, it can be fatal, but with the right treatment it need not be.  BUT, HIV is a sexually transmitted virus, just like Chlamydia and other sexually transmitted infections.  We ALL our responsible for taking the correct precautions when we decide to have sex, i.e.

Key ways include: 

  • talking to your partner about your sexual relationships;Condoms-and-safe-sex
  • contraception;
  • using condoms and dental dams;
  • being aware of how alcohol and drugs can lower inhibitions and affect decision making;
  • getting tested for sexually transmitted infections if you think you may have put yourself at risk;
  • limiting your number of sexual partners;
  • avoiding overlapping sexual relationships.

NIGRA urges everyone to be safe, and live.  Enjoy yourselves with safety in mind, and then you and your partner can enjoy the future.

condoms
 
 
Further reading:

  • Spun-Out.ie – HIV and AIDs
  • National Aids Trust – Thnk Postive: Rethink HIV
  • Sexual Health NI
  • Reuters: Anti-HIV pill, taken as needed, prevents infection in gay men
  • Paul Nicholls-Whiteman – The Worst Day Of My Life Was… Remembering The Height Of The AIDS Epidemic
  • Baroness Verma: “It’s great to hear us talk about ending AIDS but the job is far from over.”
  • Tom Knight reflects on World AIDS Day

  • PHOTOS: The Long History of World AIDS Day

 

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Filed Under: History Tagged With: AIDS, health, HIV, safety, sex, STIs

Americans Are Still Being Imprisoned For Being HIV Positive

01/12/2015 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

vice_news

By Sydney Lupkin

December 1, 2015 | 12:45 pm

American Prison
This story is part of a partnership between MedPage Today and VICE News.
There has never been a documented case in which HIV was transmitted via saliva. But Willie Campbell, who is HIV positive, has been behind bars for nearly a decade and is serving a 35-year sentence for spitting at a Dallas police officer. According to the ruling, Campbell’s saliva was a deadly weapon, and spitting at the officer was akin to using a firearm.
In 2008, Daniel Allen, who is also HIV positive, bit his neighbor during a fight and was subsequently arrested and charged — with bioterrorism. Allen faced a possible 28-year prison sentence before the charges were thrown out.
That same year, Patrice Ginn was sentenced to eight years behind bars on charges that she didn’t tell her partner she had HIV. There was conflicting testimony at the trial about whether or not she told him; he brought the charges only after their relationship ended. Ginn’s partner never actually contracted HIV.
These are just three examples of how old laws still on the books all over the United States — laws whose very premises are contradicted by science — are still getting HIV-positive people arrested and sent to prison. Many of the behaviors that are criminalized have almost no chance of transmitting the virus.
“We’re not talking about cases from 10 or 20 years ago,” said Catherine Hanssens, executive director of the Center for HIV Law and Policy. “People are being arrested and prosecuted right now.”
At least 80 HIV-positive people have been prosecuted for having consensual sex, spitting on people, or biting people in the last two years alone, according to a report by the Center for HIV Law and Policy — and Hanssens says those are just the people of whom the center became aware. Thirty-four states have HIV criminalization laws, and even states without HIV-specific laws have been known to prosecute people with HIV.

Related: How Some US Doctors Hinder HIV Prevention

Almost all of these laws were written shortly after HIV/AIDS was discovered in the 1980s. In some states, it’s a felony for a person with HIV to share a sex toy, spit on someone, or put their finger in someone’s ear, Hanssens says.
“These really came from the fear and stigma of the ’80s, when we knew very little about HIV,” said Jay Brown, director of research and public education at the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) .
According to watchdog groups, criminal charges associated with HIV haven’t let up as the decades have passed, even though the retrovirus has become better understood and drugs to treat and prevent it have gotten better, says Sarah Warbelow, HRC’s top lawyer. In the 1980s, contracting the virus was a relatively swift death sentence with no medications to speak of.
“Today, we’re in a radically different environment,” Warbelow said, explaining that decades in prison doesn’t warrant the so-called crime of transmission, if transmission indeed takes place at all. “Individuals who are treating their HIV are living pretty close to normal life spans. It’s no longer debilitating. But people still perceive HIV as it was when they first learned about it.”
There are 1.2 million people in the United States living with HIV, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though about 12.8 percent of them don’t know they’re HIV positive. People can take a daily cocktail of antiretroviral drugs that can make their viral loads — the amount of virus in their blood — undetectable and virtually impossible to transmit. People at risk for contracting HIV can also take an antiretroviral drug called Truvada as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, to help avoid infection.
“We talk about HIV now as a chronic disease that needs chronic management and chronic attention much the same way we think about diseases we’re more familiar with, like diabetes,” said Dr Wendy Armstrong, professor of medicine at Emory University and vice chair of the national HIV Medical Association.
Still, people with HIV must take drugs daily and undergo routine blood work and other testing to be sure their viral loads are under control and they don’t have any other health problems. Drug side effects can include diarrhea, headaches, and nerve problems in the short-term, as well as long-term blood sugar, cholesterol, and fat storage problems. Older patients may also have bone density issues and a buildup of cellular waste that can lead to liver failure.
This summer, the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a survey in Georgia, which has the fifth-highest number of HIV/AIDS diagnoses in the country, and found that a large minority of people held several misconceptions about the way HIV is spread. Thirty-three percent of those surveyed said they thought HIV could be transmitted by kissing. Seventeen percent thought it could be spread by sharing a drinking glass, and 12 percent thought it could be transmitted by sitting on a toilet seat previously used by someone with HIV.
None of this is true.
In nine states, it is a felony for someone with HIV to have sexual contact without disclosing his or her HIV status, but most people don’t know the law until they get charged, Hanssens says — and many charges are brought after a break-up of some kind. Only some states require plaintiffs to prove that the HIV-positive partner intended to transmit the virus.
“In a number of cases, it seems pretty clear that the complaining witness knew about the person’s HIV,” she said.
Armstrong says one of her patients who’d been raped was afraid to report it to police because she feared being arrested for failing to disclose to her rapist that she was HIV-positive.
“She was concerned if her HIV-positive status came out, in fact, she would be considered a perpetrator in that setting because of the criminalization laws,” Armstrong said, acknowledging it’s an extreme example, but one that illustrates the fear the laws can generate.
Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association, which are made up of physicians, health workers, and scientists, have come out against the laws, which they say discourage finding out one’s HIV status and encourage those who know they’re HIV positive to keep it a secret.
“Criminalization is not an effective strategy for reducing transmission of infectious diseases and in fact may paradoxically increase infectious disease transmission,” they said in a March statement. “We, therefore, urge state policy makers to promote public health by revising statutes that criminalize transmission of diseases, such as HIV infection, viral hepatitis, and other communicable diseases.”
While there is a movement to get the laws repealed, removing existing laws from the books is no easy task, says Boston University School of Law professor George Annas, who chairs the school’s Department of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights.
“Legislators just hate to repeal stuff because they’re afraid to be blamed if something happens,” he said, pointing out there’s still a law prohibiting “fornication” in Massachusetts that no one wants to repeal.
HIV-positive activist Josh Robbins, who runs ImStillJosh.com, helped develop an iPhone app called Disclosur+ he says can be used as proof of disclosure in court. Before engaging in consensual sex, an HIV-positive person can bring up the app, which displays the phrase “I’m HIV positive,” and the HIV-negative partner can tap to confirm that he or she understands. The app records a few seconds of soundless video to prove the disclosure and acknowledgment occurred.
Robbins says he finds existing HIV criminalization laws terrifying because cases involving disclosure often amount to court battles of he-said, she-said.
“You just have to think about in a jury situation, when I go to court and you are standing there accusing me and you’re crying and pointing your finger at me, and I’m the HIV-positive person,” he said. “I’m always going to get convicted no matter what. No one is going to believe me because of the stigma with HIV.”

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Filed Under: Anti-Bullying & Homophobia, History Tagged With: americas, health, HIV, hiv criminalization, hiv felony, hiv laws, hiv misinformation, hiv spitting, hiv stigma, hiv today, hiv transmission, prison, world aids day

DNA of Identical Twins Can Reveal Who’s Gay

12/10/2015 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

advocate_logo

BY DAWN ENNIS
OCTOBER 09 2015 9:58 AM EDT

couple-holding-hands

The lead researcher of the controversial test, the first that claims to detect sexual orientation, quit over concerns it may be misused.


 
Researchers say they’ve come up with a formula to reveal someone’s sexual orientation usingDNA found in their saliva that is 67 percent accurate.
The study, presented Thursday to genetics experts meeting in Baltimore, traced the genetic changes in identical twins that when combined help determine whether someone is gay or straight. It’s the study first to claim a method to detect sexuality, reported Reuters.
“To our knowledge, this is the first example of a predictive model for sexual orientation based on molecular markers,” said Tuck Ngun, a researcher at the David Geffen School of Medicine of the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the study.
According to Gallup, about 3.8 percent of the adult U.S. population identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
Of course, the idea of a genetic test for sexuality raises concerns that someone might try to alter these epigenetic modifications to change a baby’s inherent orientation. Currently, there is no way to selectively change epigenetic patterns on DNA, although the technology is being developed.
These concerns over the potential misuse of the test led the study’s lead researcher to quit the project entirely, and many scientists have expressed caution over the results, including Ngun himself.
He, too, worries the test has the potential to be used and abused. “I’m gay,” he told New Scientist, “and I’ve always wondered why I am the way I am. But once you have this information, you can’t control how it’s used or disseminated.”
From the moment a child is conceived and all through a person’s life, genetic changes occur, and they can be handed down from generation to generation. These are called epigenetic changes. The underlying code remains unaltered, but how a gene is expressed — how it works — that’s what changes.
At an American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Baltimore, Ngun stated that he studied epigenetic changes called methylation in 47 pairs of male twins. Identical twins have the same underlying DNA, but the epigenetic changes can make big differences in what happens to them later in life.
In 37 of the twin pairs, one brother was homosexual and the other wasn’t. In 10 pairs, both brothers were gay.
Dr. Margaret McCarthy, who studies the developing brain at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said in a statement that this study provides more evidence we were indeed “born this way:”

“Developing male fetuses produce very high quantities of testosterone during the second trimester and this directs psychosexual development along masculine lines, a component of which is preference for females as sexual partners.
“This study provides a major step forward in our understanding of how the brain can be affected by factors outside of the genome. It is also possible that the experience of being a homosexual or a heterosexual has itself impacted the epigenetic profile. But regardless of when, or even how, these epigenetic changes occur, their findings demonstrate a biological basis to partner preference.”

Other experts said Ngun may be going too far in saying he can predict someone’s sexual orientation by looking at his or her genes, given that his study group was very small.
Since the associations have not yet been tested in a completely independent study population, the results should be considered no more than suggestive, caution experts. There needs to be verification before any firm conclusions can be drawn, according to Johnjoe McFadden, a molecular geneticist at the University of Surrey, U.K.
Ngun is optimistic his findings may lead to bigger discoveries:

“Sexual attraction is such a fundamental part of life, but it’s not something we know a lot about at the genetic and molecular level. I hope that this research helps us understand ourselves better and why we are the way we are.”

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Filed Under: Anti-Bullying & Homophobia Tagged With: DNA, gay twins, health

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